This film was commissioned by the Secretary of the Interior to assist in promoting the proposed National Fisheries Center and Aquarium in Washington D.C.
The film shows the proposed location on the banks of the Potomac River, describes the architectural program, and gives a guided tour through a model of the galleries and exhibits.
Eames Office Consultant I. Bernard Cohen once said that “The films that Charles made were actually astonishing. In fact, they were such realistic expressions of his ideas that one had the feeling sometimes that they had been completed.” Recalling a trip to D.C. where he and his wife wanted to visit the Eameses’ National Fisheries Center, Cohen jokes: “We tried and tried. We couldn’t find the damn thing.” It finally dawned on them that the Aquarium, as tangible as it appeared in this film, did not exist—the government funding to build it hadn’t come through.
This film delves into the world of toy trains, which Charles loved long after boyhood. The work features toy trains of various vintages, styles, sizes, and materials to tell the simple story of a journey; it starts in a rail yard, continues to the countryside, moves through villages, and culminates at a station.
Charles wrote and narrated the opening to the film. He explains that, “In a good old toy there is apt to be nothing self-conscious about the use of materials. What is wood is wood; what is tin is tin; and what is cast is beautifully cast . . . It is possible that somewhere in all this is a clue to what sets the creative climate of any time, including our own.”
The concepts in the narration are more complex than they might seem at first glance. Charles is referencing the importance of “the honest use of materials,” an idea that he and Ray considered in ever one of their works.
Music score by Elmer Bernstein.
Winner of Edinburgh International Film Festival Award, 1957. Seventh Melbourne Film Festival Award, 1958. American Film Festival Award, 1959. Scholastic Teachers’ 11th Annual Film Award, 1960.
A Rough Sketch...
The 1977 film, Powers of Ten, was an expanded and updated version of this 1968 study film. Charles and Ray often gave projects long titles to indicate that they were still exploring their ideas—that the presentation was a model or a type of “sketch.”
A Rough Sketch features a linear view of our universe from the human scale to the sea of galaxies, then directly down to the nucleus of a carbon atom. With images, narration, and a dashboard, it gives a clue to the relative size of things and what it means to add another zero to any number.
Music by Elmer Bernstein.
Tops had its genesis in an earlier film produced for the Stars of Jazz television program in 1957. The Eameses decided to make a longer, color version in 1966, which they worked on in spare moments between other projects.
The film is a celebration of the ancient art and craft of top-making and spinning. One hundred and twenty-three tops spin to the accompaniment of a score by Elmer Bernstein. Using close-up, live-action photography, the film shows tops, old and new, from various countries, including China, Japan, India, the United States, France, and England.
Charles’s fascination with spinning tops went back to his childhood; in this film he found a perfect vehicle for demonstrating their beauty in motion and for making visual points about the universality of tops, the physics of motion (MIT physics professor, Philip Morrison, often showed the film to students and colleagues), and the intimate relationship between toys and science.