EAMING HIGH

“Eventually everything connects- people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key for quality per se.” Charles Eames

American industrial designers and filmmakers Charles and Ray Eames first found fame as pioneering architects of buildings (most notably their own house), furniture and textiles in the 1950s. Initially influenced and inspired by the clean lines of Scandinavian modernism, the couple’s exhibitions of design are still highly popular and regularly studied by design studies today.



In reaction the end of World War II and the Great Depression, the 1950s became a period characterized by renewal, innovation and optimism. The economy was strong and industry was booming, and the independent spirit of the Eames team set about making well-designed goods available to all consumers.

The Eames pronouncements on design emphasized the overall centrality of function together with the use of technology and mass production to make quality goods cheaper and more widely available. The commercial potential of their designs, which fused aesthetic and technical concerns together, echoes the conveyor belt, factory scenes of Berlin: Symphony of City, where industrialization and repetition of functional design provided goods to the masses. Charles and Ray employed new applications of wartime materials and methods of construction (which included moulded plywood, plastic laminates and latex) to produce a new type of expressiveness to their objects.

The stop motion, mechanical reproduction and tattooed rhythm of their short film Kaleidoscope, Jazz, Chair can be viewed as a tribute to the militaristic origins of the chairs materials. Throughout their professional partnership, the duo appears to take full advantage in the exploitation of technological breakthroughs and advancements of wood, plastic and metal.




The ergonomic creations of the Eames chairs in particular contrast heavily with the severe ‘retro-linear’ outlines of traditional modernist furniture. The fiberglass chair makes a seat out of a single shell, an almost womb-like structure completely polar to the complex construction of the established stiff-postured stool. The structure of the chair encapsulates the human body, becoming a positive space whereby an idea could perhaps be conceived and nurtured. By challenging accepted notions of design Charles and Ray promoted a new wave of modernist architecture. This bought about a contemporary paradigm of design critique and theory.




This short film below is depicts two Eames films together. Eventhough they were shot fourteen years apart, they are almost identical in mis-en-scene and imagery. It is a demonstration of the duos intense interest in not only design but the process of creation as well.




Note: the film on the left hand side of the screen is an excerpt from the classic Hollywood film The Spirit of St.Louis in which Charles filmed the plane assembly montage, and on the right is a 1970 office film, Fiberglass Chairs.



Charles and Ray represent themselves and their innovative ideas so inimitably by playing with and challenging the perceptions of the domestically mundane.

SCA:LE

In the film Manhatta, the audience is exposed to the constant opposition between large and small scales. Iconic images of The Chrysler Building, The Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty are made all the more significant when seen looming over the comparatively tiny masses of people. Similarly, in the film adaptation of The Fountainhead, architect Henry Cameron is symbolically engulfed by recurring and rhythmical speeding images of skyscrapers towering above his speeding ambulance. This scene reflects the techniques of Surrealist Cinema, as the tilted camera angles employed create the illusion of yawning shadows over the ailing figure.

Yet again, modernist cinema uses immense scale to show that even the monstrous figure of Kong becomes somewhat dwarfed as he ascends the art-deco façade of The Empire State Building. What can be concluded from all of these examples is the idea of superior technology ultimately subduing its creator and challenger.

19th Century British poet, critic and artist John Ruskin became fascinated with the concepts of beauty in art and nature. It is from these writings that he developed a theory of sublimity within architecture. To be considered sublime is to be so awe-inspiringly beautiful, heavenly and exquisite that one cannot possible define its value. The central idea of the architectural sublime, insists Ruskin,

"is that the relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigor of their masses, than on any other attribute of their design: mass of everything, of bulk, of light, of darkness, of colour, not mere sum of any of these, but breadth of them."

Modernist cinema effectively represents this phenomena representing a period of burgeoning architectural innovation.

In a move from the monumental, I want to explore the effect of miniaturization as well. Similar to Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera, Sydney artist Keith Loutit has set about the task of archiving the landscape and lifestyle of his city. Except his portrays the Sydney Metropolis as virtual realm reminiscent of a Lilliputian society.



Through the use of time lapse photography, Tilt shifting and digital technology, Loutit unites thousands of still images to impute a toy-like quality to humans as well as buildings and super-structures. Special lenses control focus and depth of field to trick the mind into thinking it is seeing a very small object. The action is then sped up which heightens the effect.

Loutit explains that “(he) wanted people to take a second look at places that were very familiar to them by detaching them from their existing perceptions.”
This short film demonstrates a correlation of old technology (previously pioneered by King Kong director Willis O’Brien) with the new, showing the progression of the celluloid from Modernist Cinema.

Shosho and the Male Gaze...

On the surface, Dupont's Piccadilly is a hub of excitement- a swarm of social bees and butterflies, yet underneath the facade it reflects the fickle nature of an insatiable society, always striving towards the next best thing. The streets and characters centred around this club demonstrate the ephemeral nature of life, lust and beauty.

I found it really interesting how the director places so much emphasis on the 'eye' in this film. Conventionally, the eye is the window to the ultimate truth, self and soul. However, through the use of camera angles, light and shadow, smoke and mirrors he creates a whole new form of witnessing and responding. It seems that what we see as spectators is really only a representation, a single truth in a plethora of realities. This is echoed in the murder scene, discreetly performed behind a screen, and the constant inclusion of textual elements such as the pen and ink and the newspapers.
Shosho (Anna May Wong) is the outsider in every sense of the word. Being a foreign woman of working class does not exactly entitle one to be apart of the hip and happening social set. Excluded to the bowels of the scullery, Shosho undulates her hips from side to side, hypnotising her co-workers. Fingers, hands, arms, shoulders- all are used in her instinctual seductive dance. Like a snake she intertwines her body with the light, smoke and music that surrounds her. Shosho is a lone flame, surrounded by downtrodden characters. Yet the look in her eyes and the Mona Lisa smile on her lips suggest she content and furthermore aware of the power that her body possesses. Her ripped stockings are the mark of a tainted woman, yet I also believe that they could be a symbol for the social restraints on a woman wanting to break free and escape a life predetermined for her.

The close-up shot of Valentine watching Shosho dance is a textbook depiction of the Male Gaze at work. In between the rhythmical puffing of his cigar, we witness his eyes transfixed on her body. It is here that we see how a man's presence is relative to the promise of power which he embodies. By contrast a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Shosho's presence is manifested in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes. Valentine's in his attitude to others.

This is a quote I found which seems to some up this idea really well:

“Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at.”
John Berger Ways of Seeing (1972)

Drawing comparisons to Judith Butler's “Gender Trouble” (1990) we see how Shosho and indeed Mabel are mechanical bodies, animated by space around them. The depiction of Shosho's tarnished legs and Mabel's bare shoulder's fetishise the feminine body, creating objects of lust. The two females are constantly performing, reinforcing their social and cultural positions to the men around them.

Like a tragic Greek epic, Piccadilly upholds the patriarchal ideology of not messing with Nature and social order. It shouts at the audience, that the ultimate folly is to ignore the constraints of society and go beyond one's 'station' in life.



Image:"Artist and Model in the Studio" by Albrecht Dürer,1525

SyMPhonY Of A CitY

Sweeping the German countryside, the opening sequence of the train ride in Rutmann's 'Symphony of a City' provides the audience with the experience of looking at a framed moving image. The discontinuity and fragmentation of the landscape only offers the viewer a small amount of time to grasp meaning from a single glance. Throughout the industrial period, film was considered as a mechanical art, part of the industrial revolution, a period no doubt characterised by advanced technology. And it is with the train that a new genre was developed. As a cinematic machine, the train offers rapidity, speed, panoramic perception, the constant appearance/disappearance of objects and the ultimate annihilation of space and time. The houses, slums, paddocks and stations allow the body to be transported to a different space/realm. Based on a paradox of stillness and simultaneous movement, it feels like the actualisation of a dream sequence where the normal conventions of time do not exist.

Lumiere's L'Arrivee dun train a La Ciotat (1895) was a pioneering film that shocked its audience with the spectacle of movement and the unexpectedness of rapid and some might say 'violent' stimuli. From it emerged a whole new cinematic rhetoric: the language of the railroad. Many comparisons can be drawn from the two films, one in particular is the personification of the train itself. Thundering towards the audience, Lumiere's locomotive seems to have a mind of its own. The driver is invisible and irrelevant as we struggle to come to terms with the magnificent power (although bridled from the inside) that is completely inherent to the machine. Similarly, in The Symphony of a City, as the doors of the station house yawn open, the menacing face of the train emerges. Billowing smoke and meditated in its movement, one cannot help but envisage a bull pawing its hoof on the dusty ground right before it charges at the Toreador.



The montage of the Berlin street scape transforms the city from a ghost-town in the morning; dull and unwelcoming to a stimulating sensory experience. Lunchtime activities, the factory, news press, and everyday happenings on an intersection offer a powerful insight into the modern city- a metropolis with an autonomy of its own. Displaying the city from so many perspectives highlights the idea that the metropolis is indeed a machine in itself. Similar to the turning cogs of the factory, the cityscape pulsates from within due to the nuances and rituals of the citizen.

“A machine is never simply technical. Quite the contrary, it is technical only as a social machine, taking men and women into its gear, or, rather, having men and women as part of its gears along with things, structures, metals, material. Men and women are apart of the machine not only in their leisure, in their loves, in their protestations, in their indignations, and so on. That which makes a machine, to be precise, are all its connections.” Franz Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (pp.81-82)

The film's many sections produces a fragmented, compartmentalised view of the city. Other than the musical accompaniment, the vectors within each frame offer a surprising flow to the piece that creates a rhythmical continuity. The intersection of vertical and horizontal lines: electricity cables, roads that disappear into the distance, high rise buildings, officers guns cocked upwards, violinists bows ebbing up and down all reflect the irrepressible strive of the city (Berlin) towards the future, industrialisation and modernity.