The Eames on the Day of the Dead
Both Charles and Ray Eames are a part of an unforgettable history of exploration through design. You try to describe them each in one word, but knowing how their projects reach from designing lasting home furniture to the stretches of designing an entire structure for IBM Pavilion for the NY Fair, it becomes not enough. I was particularly struck during the film, Eames: The Architect and The Painter, on how the Eames had a profound effect on informing the world through the medium of film. I was fairly surprised during the movie, that they shared snippets of the Day of the Dead film made by the Eames.
In the film, the viewer is initially presented with a field of marigolds, a deeply embedded symbol on the Day of the Dead. They are shown multiple images of the vast fields where farmers intentionally grow them in preparation for the Day of the Dead festivities.
A bulk of the film depicts a color-rich tradition full of the communal and celebratory nature that Mexican people have held for decades on this very special day, where their passed loved ones are able to come back and visit family. It is a history that even predates to Aztec times, before the colonization of the Spanish.
As a daughter of two Mexican immigrants, we have never personally celebrated this holiday, both as a result of transitioning into Western Society and from social responsibilities projected from our culture. In fact, I never knew about the Day of the Dead until a history lesson in elementary school. But even this was enough to get me to come home and have my mother uncover years of Dia de Los Muertos traditions that her mother and her grandmother venerated. Watching this film was almost a reenactment of what she described. The cempaxóchitls, the tables full of sugar skulls and animals, petals showing the way to the altar, and finally the shrine full of candles, food, and other ofrendas. I appreciated the colorful, raw images played on the film, depicting even children as a part of the tradition: their hands dipped in the same plaster-like sugar mixture making the figures.
Knowing that this film was made in 1957, fast-forwarding to more than 50 years later really puts the traditions, rituals, and deeply-entrenched values on mortality into perspective to the more modern, life-fleeting moments we each have in our daily lives. It is a yearly celebration that puts a truly uncommon philosophy on death into perspective: that it is a very real and natural part of life. It is intimate and it is unveiled, years after year. The Eames describe it as a, “complete involvement…” on behalf of everyone in the vicinity, as something full of “conviction and precision”.
Watching the Day of the Dead film was almost time-stopping. It allowed me to immerse myself in a forgotten culture that unfortunately is becoming less prominent. In an age of digital technologies and designs, it is easy to forget the origins of an even greater design on life. We focus too much on making the next great thing that we abandon the more real values right in front of us.
