Sprockets, Scratches, Splotches shorts program
Friday, April 18 at 7pm
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Well before the cinematic image was fractured into digital pixels, it was developed on strips of film stock ridden with holes. Either as part of avant-garde collectives or as solitary magicians, experimental filmmakers have taken this as an opening to think about the materiality of the celluloid—toying with those perforations alongside purposeful distortions and inevitable decay, integrating other visual and manual techniques of scratching, painting, coloring, and drawing. This program of shorts brings together a genealogy of works that range from the mid 60s to the present day, magnifying on screen what was meant to be hidden in the machine.
One of the pieces featured in the program is Aldo Tambellini’s Black Is (1965), a 16mm film made without any use of a camera, this work by the pioneering innovator Aldo Tambellini defied the boundaries of the medium. Scorched and scratched, Black Is acts as a portal into the darkness of an artform created through light.
Aldo Tambellini was a fellow at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) from 1976-1984. During his time at CAVS, much of his work focused on video art.
