The Films of
Charles & Ray
Eames
» blacktop
» toccata for toy trains
» house
» what is design?
» glimpses of usa
» kaleidoscope jazz chair
» spirit of st. louis
» powers of ten
» tops
» timeline
» author information
» 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
House was made as an exercise in looking at architecture through the medium of film. charles felt that details could be shown more effectively by using sequences of still images than by panning a movie camera through a room. He chose his own house for the experiment because he had already photographed a large number of slides of it and could easily fill in additional images.
The music was composed by Elmer Bernstein, who carefully timed the score to sequences of still images; when the slides were transferred to film, their progression was timed to the recorded track. The slides were recorded sequentially on 35mm motion-picture film by an animation stop-motion camera, a technique that allowed Charles to edit in the fade-ins, fade-outs, lap dissolves, and color correction processes ordinarily handled by a film laboratory.
The film is a visual tone poem that leaves the viewer with a feeling for the qualities and atmosphere of the house. The close-up shot, a technique that rapidly became an Eames trademark, is used here to “experience” the house by concentrating on its parts and details the way a person might see the house, changing focus from close to far with each glimpse.
(Eames Design; Neuhart, Neuhart & Eames)
The fast cutting of a large number of images leaves the view with an overall impression rather than one or two dominant images. The Eameses considered fast cutting a particularly productive way of looking at things because of the interesting juxtapositions it offered as well as the large numbers of images and amounts of information it conveyed.
Offered as fragments of architecture and design rather than a tour through architectural space, the film offers an impression of what it is like to experience different aspects of the house.
(Charles and Ray Eames; Kirkham)
Beyond being an interesting aesthetic exercise in its own right, House addressed one of the obvious constraints of filmmaking: the expense of the production itself. In the digital age we take for granted that nonprofessional moving pictures (home videos) can be distributed to a mass audience (via television or the Internet). But until the late 1980s, that was not really the case. Certainly in the 1950s, making a 35mm motion picture was a serious undertaking requiring a significant crew. But what if you were after something more subtle than simply recording a house (which, after all, you could probably do with a film crew in a week or two even at the most extravagant)? What if you wanted to capture those spontaneous moments of light that occur every morning for a while and then not at all for two months? You would need a tool that permitted you to do it on your own, on the spur of the moment, without the expense or the inconvenience of calling a crew together. That tool was the still camera.
When one looks at House, one is looking at the most beautiful light of the first five years of living at the Eames House. Afterward, a few sequences were photographed specially for the film to pull it together structurally, and then all of them were woven together with the divertissement written by Elmer Bernstein. Bernstein pointed out that writing for a collection of slides posed some challenges, but “that was more my problem than their problem because they'd lay all the slides out on a long table with light behind them, and then we'd go down the row looking at all the slides, and so that I could see what the images were going to be, but that was a very, very hard way to get feeling out of something. ... Live action has a rhythm that you kind of pick up. Slides are static, obviously, except that the way they used them it doesn't feel static.” One of the ways Bernstein and the Eameses communicated was through the use of bar charts, a kind of timeline of the film. There, with color pens and pencils, Charles and Ray would mark the visual arcs of the film. It was a uniquely visual way of scripting that Bernstein has never encountered in any of the more than 200 other scores he has collaborated on.
Charles and Ray always wanted things done to the highest technical standards possible. They wanted the actual film to be made in Technicolor, a color-film process that used black-and-white film. Each Technicolor frame was literally shot three different times (once for each of the three components of color). The actual duplication of the slides onto film was done at the Eames Office by Parke Meek. Charles wanted a certain quality -- a kind of confident leisure -- to the dissolves (and if you look closely at the film, even on video, they have a different quality than most film dissolves). So Meek built a kind of Rube Goldberg optical printer in which a motor turned the camera one frame at a time, rotating a piece of plywood with nails sticking out, which then advanced a wheel with the appropriate color filters. At 24 frames per second, an image that appeared on the screen for 2 seconds required 48 frames of 35mm film to be shot 3 times each (one for each color filter for a total of 144 frames). This incredibly time-consuming process achieved stupendous results. People asked to learn the technique, but even though it was written up, no one else ever did it because it was too much work. Later, when Meek explained it to the Technicolor folks, they said it could not be done. As Parke said dryly, “I didn't know any better [so] I did it. ... At times a lack of knowledge of the movie industry was a great advantage to us.”
(Eames Primer; Demetrios)