The Cool School

Hip art documentary on the 50s and early 60s LA art scene

Documentary filmmaker and Los Angeles resident Morgan Neville (best known to LFF audiences for exemplary music docs on the likes of Hank Williams and Muddy Waters) explores the emergence and impact of the beat-era LA art scene.

Delving into the archives, Neville assembles a wonderful collage of footage from the period, to create a vivid picture both of the art world in the late 50s and early 60s and of the broader culture of LA itself. This is judiciously contextualised by up-to-date interviews with the artists, curators and collectors who together shaped this influential, vividly American intervention, and whose creativity and insight should lay to rest the cliché of LA as cultural wasteland.

Those on camera include artists Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Billy Al Bengston, Walter Hopps (of the hugely significant Ferus gallery), Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell and Frank Gehry. Fluidly composed and richly textured, with a smart narration provided by Jeff Bridges and a suitably hipster soundtrack to boot, The Cool School will make you wish that arts documentaries could always be this, well, cool...

Sandra Hebron