Two Parts of a Whole: The Legacy of Charles and Ray Eames | TV/Streaming
The lounge chair and ottoman above were designed for Billy Wilder.
Eames designers like Gordon Ashby, the late Jon Neuhart (giving his final interview here) and Jeannine Oppewall (now one of Hollywood's top production designers) recall their Eames experience in glowing terms, but "The Architect and the Painter" doesn't attempt to whitewash the more difficult aspects of working with the Eamses -- or rather, working with Charles. "The matter of credit" was a sore spot among some designers, who remained anonymous despite having made substantial contributions with little or no input from Charles Eames. (That one-name dominance is nothing new in the art world: Warhol never credited his assistants, and here in Seattle, glass artist Dale Chihuly runs a brand-name studio filled with anonymous artisans.)
Even though Ray was Charles' equal in their collaboration ("Anything I can do," Charles once said, "she can do better"), we see how her subordinate role -- and Charles' later infidelity -- took an emotional toll on Ray, who valued her marriage too much to walk away from it. (In a dignified interview, Charles' former mistress and art historian, Judith Wechsler, reveals that she reluctantly ended their passionate affair out of friendship and respect for Ray.)
One of the film's most revealing archival clips comes from a 1957 broadcast of "The Arlene Francis Show," in which the sexual politics of the Eisenhower era are fully in play: As she invites the Eameses to demonstrate how the Eames chair was created, the thoroughly domesticated Francis insists on casting Ray as a subordinate wife-servant, literally and figuratively placing Ray "behind her man." It's an embarrassing time-capsule moment and it's only fitting that Ray's place in the partnership was more fully recognized when the feminist movement gained momentum in the '70s.
And yet Charles is not judged too harshly: Seemingly everyone who met him, male or female, found him charismatic, and with his broad smile and childlike sense of fun, he didn't have a malicious bone in his body. Remarkably, every Eames project was completed on a handshake, and Eames paid for any budget overages out of his own pocket. Watching the film, it's impossible to dislike the guy.
As "The Architect and the Painter" proceeds to chronicle the Eames' ever-growing projects for corporate giants like IBM (for whom Charles made his best-known film, the pioneering "cosmic zoom" exercise titled "Powers of Ten"), the documentary emerges as a four-decade chronicle of extraordinary love and symbiosis expressed through extraordinary creativity. Consider the fact that Ray Eames, on her deathbed in 1988, literally willed herself to stay alive until the 10th anniversary of Charles' passing. It was her way of honoring and ensuring their eternal connectedness in life and art.
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