"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 | | 2008 | Anthology Film Archive, New York, N.Y.
“Circuit Off” Program
Film and Video Retrospective | | 2009 | Cinematheque Francaise, Paris, France
“Masters of Texture”
Group Film Program | | 2009 | Centre for Art and Media
Brussels, Denmark
Group Show 15 video artists
“Interstitial Zones” | | 2009 | Retrospective
International Film and Video Conference
Featured Artist
Osnabruck, Germany | | 2010 | Retrospective
Harvard Film Archive
Cambridge, MA | | 2010 | Film Showing
Schrin Kunsthalle Frankfurt
"Zelluloid" Exhibition
cameraless films | | 2010 | Film Screening
ARTIUM Museum
Victoria, Spain | | 2010 | Aldo Tambellini’s Black on Black-2009
& Black Film Series-1965-69,
Harvard Film Archive-
Carpenter Center, Cambridge, MA | | 2010 | Aldo Tambellini: Black Is,
Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, MA | | 2011 | Aldo Tambellini: The Black Films,
Emerson College, Boston, MA | | 2011 | Black on Black: Works By Aldo Tambellini
Herter Art Gallery,
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA | | 2011 | Black Zero Retrospective
Chelsea Art Museum
New York | | 2012 | Aldo Tambellini - Back to Black,
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France |
| |  
 
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
BLACK TV won the Grand Prix at the 1969 Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Germany. In the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Smithsonian Museum of American Art. 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  
BLACKOUT
 
MOONBLACK
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