![]() Although they had been making moving images for a few years, in some ways the first Eames “film” is the playfully and seriously titled Rough Sketch for a Sample Lesson for a Hypothetical Course, from 1953: a multimedia lecture about communication and the structures of visual thinking. They seem to have arrived at film as a medium via their experiments with text, slide and graphic presentations. “They’re just attempts to get across an idea,” Charles claimed in an interview with Paul Schrader. Making films, he would later say, was a “terrible, enjoyable bloody business”.Ĭharles Eames in the plywood lounge chair and ottoman, 1956ĭespite their immersion in the west-coast image industry, the Eameses never conceived of the hundred or so films they made as movies per se, or even as experimental films. Before they had set up their design studio proper, Charles got a job in the art department at MGM, where he made friends with Billy Wilder and took countless photographs of Hollywood stage sets. Charles had taught himself wet-plate photography as a child, was in the habit of documenting his life and work obsessively, and encouraged studio employees to do the same: “I’ll do anything to give an excuse to take photographs.” He and Ray had met at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, married in 1941 and moved to California in the same year. As a new exhibition at the Barbican in London shows, by the mid 1950s they were producing films and multimedia presentations that are as much part of their formal and intellectual legacy as their furniture or the glass-walled Eames house itself. The NBC television spot hints at other ambitions: a decade after their first celebrity, and on the occasion of unveiling a luxurious signature piece, the Eameses are eager to plug the film they have just made about their house in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. Based on a philosophy of “learning by doing”, born out of a busy and generous studio culture, their work expanded to include buildings, toys and exhibitions. Their design career began in the 1940s with moulded plywood furniture and early plastic chairs. Charles had trained as an architect, and Ray as a painter. It’s an embarrassing interlude from one of the great collaborations in 20th-century design. ![]()
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