Modernism, Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story (Cohn, 2023)

Modernish, Inc. is a good but not great documentary that advances my understanding of a topic — design — that I knew very little about going in. If that’s faint praise, it is still praise, and it speaks more to the question of what a typical viewer might want in a documentary than in how well-executed this particular one is.

The film quickly and efficiently establishes the influence of Bauhaus design and how it spread from Europe to America, with Harvard acting as a conduit where students such as Eliot Noyes learned the principles of modern design, most notably that form follows function. Noyes expressed the idea that good design began with what a thing is and does, and he apparently disliked functional items (such as lamps or chairs) being made decorative in ways that obscure their identity or compromise their functionality. The primary corporate client through which Noyes pushed his design aesthetic was IBM, and through his influence on that corporation, we see how Noyes helped move the craft of design to include notions of corporate culture. The objects a company produces should say not only what they are but what the company is.

In the middle, the film can read at times like an IBM commercial rather than a Noyes biography, but admittedly this is also when the examples of design are the most specific. The idea of accentuating the parts of technology that the user interfaces with is illustrated through early computers. The idea of removing gilding and appendages from tools is illustrated through the IBM Selectric. These innovations are explained clearly through narration and testimonials.

As the film progresses and drifts into biopic territory, it loses some of its focus but not all of its interest. Anecdotes about Noyes’s wife and the house he designed for his family are interesting, but they also come across as the interviews and archives shaping the narrative rather than vice-versa. Discussions about how early critics of capital consumption are interesting in their own right, but they also feel like are present only because Noyes lived through them and not because they are part of the story the film is trying to tell.

Of course, one could just as easily deconstruct that last paragraph to say it illustrates the narrowness of my interest rather than a lack of focus on the film’s part. There may be some truth to that claim. The parts of the film that I admired most were the ones that made me look at the objects in my room — my laptop, a printer, a phone charger — and smile when I saw examples of the design principles the film stated Noyes helped to popularize.

Modernism, Inc. comes to streaming and DVD on July 15th, 2024 from First Run Features.