The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America’s most important designers. Perhaps best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during World War II, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life – from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age – has been less widely understood. Narrated by James Franco, Eames: The Architect and the Painter is the first film dedicated to these creative geniuses and their work.
The “Eames Era” began in the optimistic flush of American victory during World War II, and the global impact of the Eames aesthetic continues to grow unabated today. With Eames: The Architect and the Painter, Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey have made a definitive and unprecedented cinematic foray into the private world of the Renaissance-style studio that Charles and Ray Eames conceived in a cavernous warehouse on a gritty street in Venice Beach, CA. Eames: The Architect and the Painter, is the first film to be made about Charles and Ray since their deaths — and the only one that peers deeply inside the link between their artistic collaboration and sometimes tortured love for one another.
Despite their unrivaled impact on American design, the persona's of the steadfastly private Charles and Ray Eames have remained oblique beyond the giddy publicity photos they doled out to inquiring journalists while they were alive. Eames: The Architect and the Painter draws extensively from a virgin cache of archival material, visually stunning films, love letters, photographs and artifacts produced in mind-boggling volume by Charles and Ray with their talented staff during the hyper-creative forty-year epoch of the Eames Office.
Interviews with family members, including Charles’ insightful grandson Eames Demetrios, and design historians guide the viewer on an intimate tour of the Eames era, while junior designers who were swept into the 24-7 world of “The Eamery,” as they called it, flesh out a fascinatingly complex blueprint of this husband-and-wife powerhouse. Featuring interviews with Charles Eames’ daughter, Lucia, filmmaker Paul Schrader, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, noted architect Kevin Roche and a cast of former Eames Office designers, including Jeannine Oppewall, Deborah Sussman and Gordon Ashby, Eames: The Architect and the Painter provides a candid view of the emotional inner lives of two great American artists as they applied their genius to practical problems and innovation, not out of a sense of ego, but out of sheer creative necessity.
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Bonus Video - Ice Cube Celebrates The Eames
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