The Architect and the Painter
Reflections on the film and their work.
The 85-minute film by Bill Jersey and Jason Cohn delivers a glimpse of what life in the Eames’s bustling studio and eccentric home looked like. Curator Donald Albrecht aptly points out that if they had just focused on making chairs, they would have become icons in that field. This probably would have been true for any field that they zoned in on, but in the end, their impact on technology, design, and more would not have been the same. In many ways, they embody what I hope to grow into. Like Ray and Charles, I hope to remain curious, adding knowledge and gaining new expertise as I work on different projects. Seeing how people in their studio were welcomed without necessarily being able to list out their technical skills, but more on the basis of their way of approaching problems and openness to growth inspires me to challenge myself to learn quickly and accept new ways of doing things. In the end, these skills may be the most valuable and allow me to become a swiss-army-knife designer / leader of sorts.
Due to the interdisciplinary nature of their work, the movie jumps from project to project. I think I would have enjoyed a film that focused on only one or a few of their projects. A film about how their home came together, how they decorated, and existed in the space would probably have been just as enthralling. I feel this way about most of the parts in the story told by The Architect and the Painter. The fact that they worked alongside corporations such as IBM, and even designed a propaganda piece for the US government during one of the tensest periods in US history deserves its own movie. In the movie, several of the individuals being interviewed admit that it was largely a propaganda piece. Albrecht even calls them “Cold Warriors,” which made me so much more curious about their values, and how the message that they were trying to communicate in the film “Glimpses of the U.S.A” exists in their other artifacts.
Looking at “Glimpses of the U.S.A” from present, I find it shocking that the details of this project and even the contents of the message were kept under wraps by the Eames and members of their studio until the day of its reveal. I am simultaneously impressed and unsettled by the power that these designers carried in crafting something that would be visited by almost three million people in the Soviet Union. Charles’s voice rings slowly over sanitized images of the “American lifestyle,” roads, cars, and architecture. At the same time, controversy was brewing among American politicians and modern artists about what would be displayed at the exhibition in Moscow. Eisenhower was hesitant to send four out of the 75 American guides to Russia as they were black and could potentially draw attention to the U.S.A.’s systemic civil rights abuses. I see this tension in the Eames’s film, and it makes me wonder how they made decisions about which messages to align themselves with. Seeing the couple described as icons who embodied the experience of Americans and created a hope for the future, I wonder what kinds of beliefs the Eames held about the future, and whether they were also held by members of their team.
