MICHAEL GOLEC

This article originally appeared in Design and Culture, Volume 1, Number 2, July 2009

The familiar grounds the unfamiliar.  In order to contend with the variables of the universe and the human body, these two short films by Charles and Ray Eames represent the unknown at disparate scales and magnitudes of viewing, beginning, most importantly, with the constructed space of sociability.  In both films, two figures occupy a picnic blanket, delimiting the boundaries of the social within the confines of the domestic.  While the Eames’s have very often included easily recognizable motifs within their films, these two films take on a pronounced social character in terms of the spatialization of the familiar and the constructed normalcy of pairing.  The image of the picnic in both films reproduces a habitual order that establishes all views taken within the films; each view—or power—links to this establishing shot of the picnic.  An invisible line extends to the limits of human knowledge, drawing from and connecting to this familiar location.

The presence of the familiar implies a mode of seeing.  In Judith Bronowski’s preliminary script for Rough Sketch, sometimes referred to as “Cosmic View,” she writes, “We begin with a familiar view—the scale is one that we are quite used to.”  In the film, however, Bronowski narrates, “We begin with a scene one meter wide, which we view from one meter away.”  At this point, the familiar scene has already passed without comment.  In the later film, the physicist Philip Morrison comments, “The picnic near the lakeside in Chicago is the start of a lazy afternoon, early one October.” Echoing Bronowski, Morrison continues, “We begin with a scene one meter wide, which we view from one meter away.”

The familiar passes unremarked, yet it is still present.  While unvoiced, the introductory scenes in both Rough Sketch and Powers of Ten are at scales that an audience is, as Bronowski comments, “quite used to.”  In contrast to the scale of the cosmic and the bio-atomic, the picnics are experienced at the scale of the social. (Marston 2000: 219-42; 2004: 170-91)¹ Because the scene mimics a culturally identifiable practice, it provides a clearing for focus on and gathering into scaled intelligibilities.  Here the currents of perception are set to expand and contract.  The audience is poised to see the previously unseen and to broaden their stock of knowledge still anchored in the familiar.

Less than a minute passes before both film cut to overhead shots that establish their common structure.  In both films, the scale of the familiar social world (10/0 or ten to the zero power) rapidly fades from view.  Perhaps Foucault’s wager in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences that “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” is made good in the dissolution of the figures on the picnic blanket?  From this perspective one might venture that the films, in their technological understanding and efficient ordering, efface the subjects’ humanity by placing them in sequence with the nonhuman.  Such an erasure is all the more poignant, and perhaps all too familiar, when considering that the framing and editing of both opening sequences organize the male as a consistent point of reference, effectively cropping the woman from view.

Erasure is all the more apparent in Powers of Ten where, compared to the mobility of the camera as it pans over a still photograph in Rough Sketch, the two figures are mobile and edits follow the classic shot/reverse shot sequence. In Powers of Ten, the frame’s scale is adjusted to create a perception of symmetry and continuity between the two figures, emphasizing the familiarity of their pairing; when the female is cropped out, her marginalization is more acutely felt.  Her effacement, however, results in a series of alternate pairings As Paul Schrader remarks on Rough Sketch in an article on the films of Charles Eames, “…skin becomes a wrist, wrist a man, man a beach, beach a peninsula, and so on….”  Another attempt at pairing occurs in a book version of Powers of Ten.  Here Morrison writes, “This is the scale of human companionship, conversation, touch: A man is asleep on a warm October day.  Around him are necessities and pleasures for mind and body.” Morrison apparently includes the woman in his implied inventory; she is but one of the possible partners in his pairings.

Words accompany images. In both films, voice maintains a crucial connection to the familiar.  While some images that flash before the audience, such as sky and skin, are easily recognizable, the various subatomic and sweeping images in the film reveal almost nothing on their own, requiring language to organize and describe them.  The continuity of voice and language strives, as Roland Barthes might say, to “fix” the meaning of the images as they rush by; text helps the audience to “choose the correct level of perception.”(Barthes 1977: 39)² The voiceover acts as a running set of aural captions, each spoken segment informing the audience what they are seeing (or should see) at any given moment.  Also, from the very beginning of the film, the voice accompanies the audience as they confront the vastness of unfamiliar territories.  Rough Sketch and Powers of Ten’s emphasis on the familiar counters what Barthes identifies as “the terror of uncertain signs.” (Barthes 1977: 39)³ The accumulation of an array of images culminate in dense works that, unless accompanied by science’s bibliographies, are deeply unintelligible or lack intelligibility in their semantic depths and their extreme variance of scale.  Because familiar and consistent, the certainties of the language of science produce assurances by further broadening the scope of each frame to include the viewer into its system.

The familiar produces the social.  The social produces the familiar. The familiar in both image and language—the multiple pairings of male to female, human to nonhuman, and image to text—resonates throughout Rough Sketch and Powers of Ten in successive waves of widening fields of view and magnifications. The organization of the unfamiliar impacts the everyday experience of the social.  Both films reaffirm the necessary role of the familiar in the construction of the social at every fathomable scale—the social construction of science.  Conversely, the films’ amplifications and reductions collocate intense perceptions such that the audience sees the social through stages of the unfamiliar and scales of scientific knowledge—the scientific construction of the social.

Notes

I use “scale” and “social” as these terms have been understood in the field of human geography, specifically Sallie Marston’s research on social reproduction and the operations of institutions at different scales.  See (Marston 2004: 170-91) and (Marston, 2000: 219-42).

References

Barthes, Roland. 1977. “The Rhetoric of the Image.” Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang.

Marston, Sallie. 2004. “A Long Way from Home: Domesticating the Social Production of Scale.”  Scale and Geographic Inquiry: Nature, Society, and Method. Eds. Eric S. Sheppard and Robert Brainerd McMaster. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.

Marston, Sallie A. 2000. “The Social Construction of Scale.” Progress in Human Geography 24.2: 219-42.