We see the same clusters, the same nebula, and from the sky it would be difficult to distinguish the Russian city with the American city.” So begins Charles Eames’s narration in Glimpses of the U.S.A., a larger-than-life installation the Eames Office produced for the United States Information Agency. “When we look at the night sky, these are the stars we see: the same stars that shine down upon Russia each night. Those ideas were characteristically diverse and ran the gamut from pure visual play to close readings of the world around us, to educational, and even political films. They’re just attempts to get across an idea.” As Charles explained in an extensive 1970 interview with Film Quarterly, the medium was a means to connect: “They’re not experimental films, they’re not really films. Charles had been a photographer since discovering his father’s camera equipment as a child and the allure of film-made with technical tools, easily reproducible, communally experienced, and distributable on a mass scale-shared startling likenesses to the couple’s furniture designs. Often presented as close visual readings and set to an instrumental score by Elmer Bernstein-he composed the music for The Magnificent Seven, The Ten Commandments, To Kill a Mockingbird, Ghostbusters, and many others-these short films imbued everyday objects with a sense of playful wonder and appreciation.įilm was a natural evolution for the Eameses as it presented a natural and deft vehicle to communicate their panoply of ideas and to experiment with technology and communication.
Though rarely seen publicly, the rough experiment served the basis for several subsequent Eames toy films like Toccata for Toy Trains (1957) and Tops (1969), that took everyday objects, toys, and folk rituals as a recurring topic of interest. The film was made using wind-up toys, circus posters, and drawings by Saul Steinberg. The couple wanted to use his 16mm film projector-which he lent them while on location in South America-so they rented a camera and produced their first film, Traveling Boy in 1950. Philip Dunne, a writer, director and producer for Twentieth Century Fox, was a client and friend, and planted the seed for Charles and Ray’s first forays into filmmaking. For the affable Charles and Ray, who lived perched above the sea in the home they designed in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, their exploration of filmmaking was as much personal as it was professional.
“Projects changed in emphasis and the office moved away from furniture as a full-time occupation to projects in which the transmission of information was the most important factor,” recall John and Marilyn Neuhart, frequent collaborators with the Eames Office, in the book Eames Design, which they coauthored with Ray. The Eameses have over 125 films to their credit, with film, installations, and information design occupying the bulk of their output in the 1960s and 70s. Wilder and a coterie of other Hollywood friends served as something of a bridge between the worlds of design and film-a bridge that, by the end of their careers, Charles and Ray crossed scores of times. Louis and the opening credits Ray designed for Wilder’s 1957 film Love in the Afternoon speak to a rich friendship and collaboration, and they also show that the creative peregrinations of the Eameses at some point had to move behind the camera. And though the montage sequences he did for Wilder’s 1957 documentary The Spirit of St.
Designed expressly for Wilder (he was the recipient of the first production model-a gift from the Eameses) to use as a perch for his brief but frequent afternoon naps in 1968, the chaise is just 18-inches wide, and, as Wilder noted, “If you had a girlfriend shaped like a Giacometti, it would be ideal.”Ĭharles once said that he learned more about architecture on Wilder’s sets than anywhere else. Lucky for Wilder, then, that his long-standing friendship with Charles and Ray Eames-perhaps the era’s most lauded furniture designers-yielded the exquisitely elegant and perilously narrow Eames Chaise. His problem was making sure that his catnaps didn’t lead to deep, disruptive slumber. Nothing like 20 winks between lunch and dinner to keep the creative juices flowing. Billy Wilder-the Hollywood director of classics like Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and Double Indemnity-loved to nap.
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