"The Black Film Series, a sequence of seven films made between 1965-69, is a primitive, sensory exploration of the medium, which ranges from total abstraction to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the Vietnam War, and black teenagers in Coney Island. Before picking up a camera, Tambellini physically worked on the film strip, treating the emulsion with chemicals, paint, ink and stencils, slicing and scraping the celluloid, and dynamically intercutting material from industrial films, newsreels and broadcast television. Abrasive, provocative and turbulent, the series is a rapid-fire response to the beginning of the information age and a world in flux. "

– Mark Webber, Independent Film, England

EXPERIMENTAL FILM
	1965-1968	BLACK IS: 4 min. long First film Done entirely without the use of a camera BLACK TRIP 1: 4-1⁄2 min BLACK TRIP 2: 3 min. BLACK PLUS X: 8 1⁄2 min. BLACKOUT: 9 min MOONBLACK: 14 min BLACK TV: 10 min Winner of the Grand Prix at Oberhausen Film Festival 1969
	2004	LISTEN 2005 Winner of 1st Prize Experimental Film by Independent Filmmaker at New England Film & Video Festival Selected at Potenza Film and Video Festival, Potenza, Italy
FILM FESTIVALS AND SCREENING (partial listing)
	1967	1st Festival of North American Cinema Cinectiy, Toronto, Canada Sogetsu International Experimental Film Festival, Sogetsu, Japan 2nd Underground Film Festival Tokyo, Japan EXPO ’67 International Festival of Film for Young People Youth Pavilion Montreal, Canada
	1968	X Screen Museum Allrof-Richartz, Cologne, Germany One man Film Exhibition 1968 Yale Film Festival Yale University, New Haven, CT "BLACK TV" split screen received Honorable Mention 6th Annual Avant-Garde Film Festival New York, N.Y. Film Festival San Francisco State College San Francisco, CA
	1968 & 1969	Ann Arbor Film Festival Ann Arbor, Michigan “BLACK TV” received Honorable Mention
	1969	Oberhausen Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany Won Grand Prix for "BLACK TV"
	1971	Jewish Museum New York, N.Y. One Man Film Show Museum of Modern Art New York, N.Y. "Cineprobe" One Man Film Show
	1974	Anthology Film Archives New York, N.Y. One Man Exhibition "From Film to Video"
	1975	Center for Advanced Visual Studies MIT, Cambridge, MA. "Arttransition" Split-screen film projection & Video Performance
	1977	Documenta 6 Kassel, Germany
	2003	1st HOWL Festival New York, N.Y. Mini-Film Retrospective
	2004	2nd HOWL Festival New York, N.Y. Mini- Retrospective of film and video Premiere screening of new computerized film "LISTEN" New England Film and Video Brookline, MA. Winner First Prize for Experimental Short by Independent Filmmaker
	2005	3rd HOWL Festival New York, New York Premiere Screening of “Digital Triptych,” “–1 (Minus One)
	2006	Screening of “LISTEN” Syracuse International Film Festival Winner of First Prize Experimental Short Category
	2006	OFF: Other Film Festival Queensland, Australia screening: Black Plus-X, Black & White; Black Trip, Black & White; Black T.V., Black & White
	2007	OFF: Other Film Festival BRISBANE: INSTITUTE OF MODERN ART, OLD MUSEUM, AHIMSA HOUSE. MELBOURNE: ACMI Screened: Black Trip
	2007	Art Gallery of New South Wales: Expansive Cinema 2-5 New South Wales, Australia Screened: Black Trip
	2007	Syracuse Film Festival, NY retrospective of Aldo Tambellini’s film & video work Aldo received Lifetime Achievement Award
	2007	Evolution Film Festival, Leeds, UK retrospective of Aldo Tambellini’s work in film & video
	2007	Lucca International Film Festival (Italy) retrospective of Aldo Tambellini’s work in film & video
	2007	SNOB (Somewhat North of Boston Film Festival) N.H. retrospective of Aldo Tambellini’s film & video

BLACK IS (1965)

To the sound of a heartbeat and made entirely without the use of a camera, this film projects abstract forms and illuminations on a night-black background and suggests as Tambellini says, “seed black, seed black, sperm black, sperm black.” Grove Press Film Catalog

BLACK TV (1968) Split screen

Statement by Aldo Tambellini

this is the news:
time is shooting from the video gun
images are bullets targeting the screen
TV the assassin of reality is a weapon pointed at your mind
the sixties have passed/recorded/obliterated/stored/erased death/starvation/riots/assassinations/moon landing/ bombs/choppers/astronauts
familiar images stored in the videodisk of the mind recalled
Black TV begins with the beam turning on
the white noise the electronic snow
Black TV ends with the beam going off
to black

Black TV won the Grand Prix at the 1969 Oberhausen International Short Film Festival. "The film is an artist’s sensory perception of the violence of the world we live in, projected through a television tube. Tambellini presents it subliminally in rapid-fire abstractions in which such horrors as Robert Kennedy’s assassination, murder, infanticide, prize fights, police brutality in Chicago, and the war in Vietnam are out of focus expressions of faces and events." Grove Press Film Catalog

BLACK TRIP (1965)
Through the uses of kinescope, video, multimedia, and direct painting on film, an impression is gained of the frantic action of protoplasm under a microscope where an imaginative viewer may see the genesis of it all. – Grove Press Film Catalog

BLACK TRIP 2 (1967)
“An internal probing of the violence and mystery of the American psyche seen through the eye of a black man and the Russian revolution.”– A.T.

BLACK PLUS X (1966)
Tambellini here focuses on contemporary life in a black community. The extra, the “X” of Black Plus X, is a filmic device by which a black person is instantaneously turned white by the mere projection of the negative image. The time is summer, and the place is an oceanside amusement park where black children are playing in the surf and enjoying the rides, quite oblivious to Tambellini’s tongue-in-cheek “solution” to the race problem. – Grove Press Film Catalog