Richard Clay revisits Roland Barthes for the 21C…

You can watch the film here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000p9t7

The online streaming service, Mubi, is showing a documentary about the American modernist designers, Charles and Ray Eames.

Mr and Mrs Eames are probably the most significant American designers of the 20C. Charles trained as an architect and Ray as a painter. they applied those sensibilities to all of their design projects in furniture, exhibition, architecture and film…Based in California, they provided an antidote to the relatively austere, East-Coast school of US design, that derived from the European and Bauhaus pioneers.

In its original form, the modernist focus on materials and functionality had stripped away all decoration as unnecessary frivolity…C+RE understood, especially in the context of California, that it was exactly those feelings of fun, frivolity and joy that would made their products widely appealing. In the end, their combination of joy and logic, expressed through materials, was unbeatable…

Their stand-out work includes…

The Eames House (case-study house no8) designed and built in 1947 from standard parts…

The US Army moulded plywood leg-splint

The furniture (for Evans, Herman Miller and Knoll)

The exhibitions (as an expression of the mind-palace)

The films (Powers of 10 etc)

Charles Eames said in the end, everything connects…And it does! They showed this in their multimedia and multi-channel exhibition displays

They proposed a form of design was about making things better (ergonomic, effective and efficient), with less (economy), and for more people (mass production). That provided the scientific, economic and ethical justification for their efforts to combine art and life, and to thereby build a better world.

These were exactly the progressive values identified by Walter Benjamin in the Author as Producer.

In the film, one of their former colleagues describes how many designers are content to manipulate objects; but that Charles was happiest manipulating ideas and expressing them as objects. That’s philosophy as a practical activity, expressed through material objects…brilliant.

My own connection with Charles and Ray Eames began at Junior school…the school was a bit useless and many staff had lost heart. I didn’t understand, but in Friday’s we had a film show because the staff had gone to the pub at lunch time. Those Friday afternoon filmsm including all the work of the Eames Office, changed my life.

The film critic and director, Paul Schrader, has suggested that the multi-screen and multi-channel , multi-media presentations designed by the Eames Office were instrumental in speeding up the image culture of the 1960s…I’ve posted about speed and image, here

https://csmbagcdcorelanguages.myblog.arts.ac.uk/category/context/

There’s lots more (42 posts) about speed and images on my personal blog too…

https://paulrennie.rennart.co.uk/search/speed

Supplemental O1

One of the things I noticed in all the photographs of Charles and Ray Eames is of how stylish they were. Charles sported that Californian country-club look that I liked, with bow ties. It’s amazing to think that all the work they did was in the days of cutting-out and sticking down. Charles must have used ink pens when he started…and chose the bow tie to pair style and practicality…the bow-tie was the tie-of-choice for anyone working technically and carefully with hand-and-eye – surgeons and architects especially.

Charles and Ray Eames understood that, in the end, creative people are designing themselves and living a life as an expression of design. It’s not surprising that this kind of ontological understanding of design should express itself through work, life and style.

As Charles once said, in the end everything connects…

The BBc showed a lovely film about the Nigerian musician, and originator of the Afro-Beat genre, Fela Kuti. You can watch the film, here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000pr2n/arena-fela-kuti-father-of-afrobeat

In the 1960s Kuti fused elements of jazz, soul and high life genres to great a universally appealing Afro-Beat form of funk. The film described the musical origins of this fusion and its wide appeal.

The film also presented Kuti’s remarkably open living and working arrangements in his self-styled commune…and accounted for the Pan-African transcendent potential of the music and its associated political power.

The legacies of colonialism have tended to continue the divisive African rule. A universally appealing musical culture was understood, by Kuti, to have enormous cultural and political power. It was interesting to see the film contrast this with the work of, say, Bob Marley or Nile Rodgers. Not to mention George Clinton and Earth, Wind and Fire…

The BBC has a great selection of classic old films available to watch on its iplayer platform.

The British artist and film director, Steve McQueen, has made a film about the Mangrove 9…You can watch the film, here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08vy19b/small-axe-series-1-mangrove

The Mangrove Restaurant was in All Saints Rd, Notting Hill, London. The Mangrove was a community restaurant established by Frank Crichlow and, by virtue of its location and style, had attracted a celebrity following. Perhaps because of this, the restaurant had suffered a long sequence of police harassment. So much so, that the Mangrove community mobilised to protest against unfair policing. The Nine, identified as ring-leaders were arrested and brought to trial at the Old Bailey.

The trial of the Mangrove 9 was not a miscarriage of justice in the traditional sense. No lengthy custodial sentences were passed. Indeed, the 9 were found not guilty of all the major charges brought against them. The trial was a victory for the civil rights movement in the UK, and revealed the systemic bias and brutality within the policing of the black British community.

This film, and its story, is important to watch…

The significance of the Mangrove as a community restaurant should not be underestimated. It provided a space (not as safe as it should have been) for people to meet and share experiences. It was exactly the kind of empathetic and community building intervention required at the time. Frank Crichlow deserves enormous credit for taking on this responsibility and continuing the project in the face of un-provoked and continuous police harassment.

Secondly, the story is important for revealing the significance of the structural analysis of the systemic bias within the institutions of the British state apparatus. This analysis had been pioneered, in the USA, by the Black Panthers, and was applied to the UK by the British Black Panther Movement. The role of activist lawyers, Ian MacDonald especially, was instrumental in helping the Mangrove 9 understand how to resist and subvert the established process of criminal justice in the UK. There’s an important scene in which the systemic and implicit blame attaching to the status of victim is revealed…This applies equally to gender discrimination etc.

Back then, the British public were mostly unfamiliar with the workings of criminal justice system and were complacent in their belief in the neutrality and even-handedness of the police and their belief in the integrity of the legal system. The public were regularly reassured, through the press, that the British police and the legal system were the best in the world…The acquittal of the Mangrove 9 played out against the background of trumped-up charges, fabricated evidence and the bias of the system, began to reveal this myth.

The radical law project was able to show that the systemic bias, revealed in the Mangrove 9 case, was applied through the workings of the state to all minorities through the processes of division, exclusion and enclosure. The alignment of civil-rights, gender-equality, and class-struggle through the shared experience of a consistent and wide-ranging pattern of discrimination should have ushered-in a period of wider and closer left solidarity…the promise and potential of this broad popular-front was brutally dismantled by Margaret Thatcher’s government at the end of the 1970s.

NB The work of designer, David King, for the Anti-Nazi League through the mid to late 1970s provided for an exemplary form of design activism. See, for example

The subsequent miscarriages of justice throughout the 1970s and to the present and often directed at Irish and Black British minorities has simply revealed the deep roots of this malpractice. The Guildford 4 and the Birmingham 6 were wrongly convicted of terrorist bombings in the UK. The brutal and public murder of Stephen Lawrence and revealed the institutionalised racism of the Metropolitan Police. Now, we are discovering to the disproportionate and duplicitous undercover policing directed at marginal political activism…

The Small Axe title is derived from the Bob Marley lyric about big trees and small axes.

The critic John Berger reflects on his life and art in a film documentary interview on the BBC. You can watch it here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b082qynq/john-berger-the-art-of-looking

Berger is famous for his series of TV films, Ways of Seeing (1972), in which he deconstructed the assumptions and conventions that inform our interpretation of the worlds around us. Berger’s films showed how this was anything but natural, and was to a large extend a social and ideological construct.

Revealing the connection between politics, the individual and cognition was, for Berger, a form of creative and therapeutic practice through dialectical liberation…

You can read the book, available in pdf format, and watch the original TV films on the internet. The last two paragraphs of the first chapter, screen grab below, are crucial in establishing the connection between art and politics and life…

The BBC showed a lovely film about a London music legend – Ronnie Scott’s jazz Club in Soho, London. You can watch the film, here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000pjcm/ronnies-ronnie-scott-and-his-worldfamous-jazz-club

The film had quite a lot of scene-setting against stock-footage of London by Night and NYC…all very neo-noir. Back in the day, Soho was London’s red-light district and night-time economy…so there were plenty of colourful characters in the background.

It was a bit heartbreaking to watch this film against the current background of pandemic and lockdown. We really don’t know how much of the hospitality and entertainment industry will survive. I’m confident that it will bounce back, but it may take time.

Ronnie Scott modelled his club, founded with his best friend, Peter King, on the NYC clubs in 52nd St…and it has provided a small and intimate venue for jazz legends for over 60 years. Scott’s has its very own old-school neon too…must be one of the last in Soho.

The whole jazz community is an exemplar of the idea of community of practice, where people work together and support each other. The club provided an empathetic and social focus for this activity. The point is that you can’t really do jazz on your own.

The film presents a sort of history of post WW2 jazz…and I learnt about Blind Roland Kirk.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk (August 7, 1935 – 1977 December 5) was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist who played tenor saxophone, flute, and many other instruments. He was renowned for his onstage vitality, during which virtuoso improvisation was accompanied by comic banter, political ranting, and the ability to play several instruments simultaneously.

Ronnie Scott wasn’t just a gifted musician doing music…he became the music. That’s a form of ontological design of self which is just inspirational.

If you are interested in the history of jazz, there are quite a few programmes from the BBC which have been put onto Box of Broadcasts. You can watch them there.

I posted before about music and the railway, here

The C4 international streaming site, Walter Presents, is showing a very recent French TV police drama about biological terrorism…all virus and hazmat suits.

You can watch the series on the WP website or through the all4 website.

This is the third drama set in the police of the mountain region around Annecy and its lake.

The film streaming platform, Mubi, are showing the Comedies and Proverbs cycle of films by the the French film director, Éric Rohmer.

Rohmer was a member of the French New Wave in cinema during the 1960s. He was an editor at Cahiers du Cinema and offers a counter-point to the better known films of his contemporaries, JL Godard, François Truffaut and Alain Resnais.

Interestingly, Rohmer identifies as a christian-democrat and social conservative of the Catholic tradition. His films are low-key ensemble pieces that often play out against a background of apartments, living rooms and, in Pauline à la Plage (1983), seaside and holiday.

We discovered the TV series Justified that is showing on all4 in box-set format…you can watch all 70 odd episodes.

The series tells the story of Raylan Givens, Federal Marshall of Harlan, Kt, USA. Timothy Olyphant combines the cynicism of Dirty Harry period Clint Eastwood with Jack Nicholson charm to dazzling effect.

The whole thing is a kind of down south homespun version of The Sopranos, with elements of Twin Peaks and spaghetti westerns stirred in. Teriffic.