Experimental Film-maker:     Filmography    |   Aldo's use of Black
Filmography

"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
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
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