Austin Film Society and Experimental Response Cinema are bringing selected films of renowned filmmaker Aldo Tambellini to Austin, including his Black Cycle, made between 1965 and 1968. These films are dynamic happenings, made with treated stock and overprinted industrial films and other sources.

Screening includes:

Black Is, b/w, 4min (1966)
Black TV, b/w, 9min (1968)
Black Plus X, b/w, 9min (1966)
A Black Trip, b/w, 4min (1965)
Soundblack, b/w, 3min (1968)
No Name Film 1, b/w, 20min with a live synthesizer soundtrack performed by Austin, TX’s Rick Reed and Tara Bhattacharya Reed.

Directed by Aldo Tambellini
USA, Various, 1h 10min, Video
Aldo Tambellini was a central figure in the East Village art scene that thrived during the 1960s. A poet, painter, sculptor and pioneering multi-media artist Aldo Tambellini (b. 1930) has worked in a staggering range of media – from his early Arte Povera-style sculptures and abstract drawings done in Italy and America in the 1950s and 1960s, to his experimental work in early video and television art, which he pioneered alongside his close friend and occasional collaborator Nam Jun Paik, to the series of abstract films he made in the 1960s.

Aldo Tambellini was born in Syracuse, New York in 1930, his father from Sao Paolo, Brazil, his mother from Italy. He was taken to Italy at the age of eighteen months where he lived in Lucca (Tuscany). At the age of ten, he was enrolled in art school in Lucca. His neighborhood was bombed during WWII; twenty-one of his friends and neighbors died and he miraculously survived. In 1946, Aldo returned to the United States. With a full scholarship at Syracuse University he received a BFA in Painting, ‘54 and a Teaching Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, MFA ’59.

In 1959, Aldo moved to New York City’s Lower East Side. He founded the underground, “counter-culture” group, “Group Center,” which organized alternative ways and non-traditional presentation of the artists’ work to the public. He pioneered in the video art movement in the late 60’s. In 1965, he began painting directly on film beginning his “Black Film Series” of which, “Black TV,” (made using both film and video) was the winner of the International Grand Prix, Oberhausen Film Festival, 1969.Simultaneously, Aldo began a series of “Electromedia Performances” which organically brought together, projected paintings, film, video, poetry, light, dance, sound and live musicians. He founded the Gate Theatre, the only daily public theatre showing avant-garde independent filmmakers and in 1967, he co-founded with Otto Piene, the Black Gate, a second theatre which presented live multi-media (Electromedia) performances and installations.

“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

From 1976 to 1984, Aldo was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he conducted workshops and organized with “communicationsphere” a series of international interactive Media Communication Projects. Since ’84, he has concentrated on poetry and performing his poetry with music and video projection.

In 2010 Aldo was awarded a Gold medal from the Italian Government, Lucchesi Nel Mondo Organization, in recognition of his lifetime achievement in the Arts.