Digital Video magazine — December 2011
Mid-Century Modernists: Production on ‘Eames: The Architect and The Painter’

The “Eames Era,” as it became known, began in the optimistic flush of American victory following World War II, and the global impact of the mid-century Eames aesthetic continues to be felt today. Eames: The Architect and the Painter is a definitive and unprecedented cinematic foray into the private world of the Venice Beach, Calif., studio of Charles and Ray Eames, where design history was born.

Narrated by James Franco, and distributed by First Run Features, the documentary feature is the first film to have been made about Charles and Ray Eames since their deaths, and includes interviews with family members and design historians in an intimate tour of the Eames Era. The film draws extensively from a previously untouched archive at the Library of Congress comprised of visually stunning films, photographs and artifacts that were produced in mind-boggling volume by Charles and Ray along with their talented staff during the hyper-creative forty-year epoch of the Eames Office.

Funded in part by grants from the NEH, the NEA and IBM, the project took filmmakers Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey nearly five years to complete. Working closely with the Eames Office gatekeeper, Charles’ grandson Eames Demetrios, Cohn and a cadre of researchers painstakingly tracked down 35mm prints of footage created by the Eames Office that had previously only been available in 16mm format.

“The archive is very eccentric. Charles and Ray weren’t professional filmmakers, they were designers making films in a very intuitive way, the way a very talented amateur might do it, and the archive definitely reflects that,” Cohn said, describing the amount of research that went into the project. (Read full story…)