a short video, shot on super 8 film, using a canon XL-1014 film camera. made in the 90’s by ucef hanjani in california during his first 2 years at art center titled “a poor attempt at cinema” with many thanks to daniel for editing the original film, denise weaver, shadi shahrokhi, pierre picot and jorge pardo for the cast, as well as george porcari as advisor.
the footage was shot for a narrative film that involved a girl and a boy as part of a school project, but the film was shelved after receiving less than positive feedback from hanjanis film mentor and advisor george porcari… sighting “too many analogies,” and “loaded with cliche symbolism,” ultimately making the film “just plain bad”.
hanjani later patched various clips of the discarded film to music he listened to at the time, making this a throw-away visual short film of sorts. found in the archives it was transferred and cleaned up after a decade of storage.
when this was shared with george porcari some decades later he wrote: “great to see the footage again. i like the film as is here actually, it’s a poetic time capsule of that time/place, great to see you and and your friend, shadi, as youngsters playing around and pierre picot from when he was well and still teaching. you should find some composer you like and he could score it – keep the title – just leave it as is. there’s no place in today’s world for a crazy teacher like pierre picot now, just teaching by the seat of his pants… winging it – he would have to be famous to teach at art center. thanks for sending…”
hanjani and his mentor and teacher, porcari, have since kept in touch and have become good friends and see one another to this day. view all work for early super-8.
