Super-retro modern: Eames, Mondrian and ambiguous space

‘This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour…’

Piet Mondrian, ‘Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art’

More than most houses, the Eames house seems an object first and a home second. A child’s toy, albeit of an inscrutable kind, placed on the ground among bushes. The Eames’ enthusiasm for toys reinforces this idea. Its proportions are oddly miniaturized; it is no larger than it needs to be. It has the curious property of making objects around it seem also toylike: trees, steps, a bicycle. House After Five Years, therefore, bears a skewed relation to the later Toccata for Toy Trains with its disorienting and hilarious world of giant miniatures.

The title of the work seems tinged with defensiveness. It seeks to address the question: Can anyone really live in such a fiercely modern design solution? Would they want to? We are reminded of Edith Farnsworth and the Mies van der Rohe debacle. In making the film the Eameses seem determined to show how homely and welcoming their version of the modernist box has become. Much is made of their collection of primitivist art; the height of fifties chic, and a ready-made subject for a photographer obsessed with pleasing patterns and repetition. Cups, plates and bowls are arranged with artful asymmetry. Oranges and croissants glow in the morning sun. If the shared professional status of Mr and Mrs Eames contained elements found threatening to the American mainstream (as suggested by their unintentionally hilarious NBC TV appearance) the mise-en-scene of their married life is reassuringly bourgeois. Look, they seem to say; we’re just like you. Only a lot cooler.

But the depiction of agreeable domesticity seems only one facet of the film. House is a photo-composition; a montage of stills. Dynamism in the film comes from the editing. You could expect a restful, pastoral rhythm to be chosen; but cutting in the early minutes of the film is rapid and somewhat disorienting. In terms of classical film technique, the avoidance of scene-setting master shots and rapid cutting between views with an ambiguous relation to each other is a method calculated to induce anxiety and foreboding in the viewer. Deep shots of the garden path in particular, and of closed or part-opened doors and windows have the effect of emphasising absence. House After Five Years is a strikingly empty film. If the intent is to suggest the carefree occupants have just stepped out for a moment (to get more croissants, perhaps), there is a weird ambiguity at work – almost between the shots, you might say, as in the mood evoked ‘between the lines’ of a novel. My Hollywood-conditioned imagination immediately began concocting scenarios in response to the ‘set up’ being presented to it. A body floating face down in a pool perhaps, Sunset Boulevard-style; or arranged artfully on the drive, like one of Warhol’s Crash pictures. All done in Antonioni-esque silence, for a funky fifties New Wave feel. I started hoping Marcello Mastroianni would appear, look around indifferently, and light a cigarette.

After reflection, I think the ambiguity of the film proceeds from the house itself. While the film seems to advertise warm domesticity, the hard-edged Mondrian-esque façade suggests an art object that is indifferent, possibly hostile, to human measures and needs. From the outside – trees and flowerbeds notwithstanding – the house begins to remind me of one of Donald Judd’s epic metal installations. Not meant to be used – just there. If this is entirely contrary to the intentions of the filmmakers, so be it. But I can’t help thinking that if David Lynch was asked to make a film of the same house, with the same title, it would be very similar indeed.