The Films of
Charles & Ray
Eames
» movie clip
» blacktop
» toccata for toy trains
» house
» what is design?
» glimpses of usa
» kaleidoscope jazz chair
» spirit of st. louis
» powers of ten
» tops
» timeline
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» bibliography
“We have not supposed there is a poetry of ideas.”
– Charles Eames
Chuck Pratt
Architecture 4395
The Constructive Vision
Prof. Ed Baum
Fall 2003
Charles wanted to use dissolves as transitions between scenes. As Charles was still an amateur at film editing, he called Ted Fogelman at Consolidated Film Industries for advice. Over the phone, Fogelman explained about A and B rolls and other intricacies of film production. Then Charles, using a primitive system of handcrafted rewinds, edited the cut film and synchronized it to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, played by Wanda Landowska, by reading the optical track for visual clues to see where the music changed tempo. As Ray said later, “Miraculously, many of the [visual] points coincided as if [the music] had been written for the film.”
In 1957 Blacktop, without its music track, was shown on “Stars of Jazz,” a Los Angeles television program featuring local and nationally known jazz musicians in live performance. While Oscar Peterson improvised to the projected images, his hands were mixed with the film. At the end of the performance [of Blacktop] the producers announced that the Eameses were working on a new piece of film for the following week’s program, an announcement that came as a complete surprise to Charles and Ray, who were watching the program as it was being broadcast. They decided to try to meet the deadline and hurriedly began work on a film about spinning tops that they had been thinking about for some time. Working with staff member Parke Meek in the studio at their house, the Eameses produced enough footage for the short segment. Though shot in black and white, this footage is the precursor of Tops, their 1968 color film, and shows close-ups of a variety of spinning tops.