The Society for Moving Images in the Built Environment

The Society for Moving Images
in the Built Environment (SMIBE)
Invites You

to their 2009 Film Competition Screening, Story about a Place
and a Showing of the Feature Documentary, The Cool School

Thursday, October 22, at 6:00 PM

MAK Center for Art and Architecture
at the Schindler House
835 N. Kings Rd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069

SMIBE is pleased to announce a film screening of last year's "Story about a Place" competition winning film shorts and a screening of the film "The Cool School" directed by Morgan Neville.

At the event they will launch the 2010 film competition "Places that Matter." The 2010 competition is made possible by a grant from the Graham Foundation.

The 2009 film competition called for moving image stories (under 6 minutes) that investigate, explore, and entertain our communities about social, environmental, political, technological, and economic issues that designers of the built world should be discussing. In their inaugural competition they received over 90 entries from 13 countries. There were 4 submissions selected as finalists from the general category and 4 from the student category. Selections from these 8 shorts will be screened at the MAK Center.

The Cool School is an abject lesson in how to build an art scene from scratch and what to avoid in the process. The film focuses on the seminal Ferus Gallery, which groomed the LA art scene from a loose band of idealistic beatniks into a coterie of competitive, often brilliant artists, including Ed Kienholz, Ed Ruscha, Craig Kauffman, Wallace Berman, Ed Moses and Robert Irwin. Ferus also served as launching point for New York imports, Andy Warhol (hosting his first Soup Can show), Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein, as well as leading to the first Pop Art show and Marcel Duchamp's first retrospective. What was lost and gained is tied up in a complex web of egos, passions, money, and art. This is how LA came of age.