Aldo Tambellini: Reflections
Revolutions Per Minute Festival
Saturday, October 4, 2025
2:30 pm–4:30 pm
MFA Boston
CAVS Fellow Aldo Tambellini (1930–2020) was a trailblazing artist and activist known for his radical experiments in light, film, video, and performance. Curated by Robert Harris, this screening brings together four seminal works that span Tambellini’s decades-long career and capture his fusion of art, media, and social consciousness.
A pioneer of “electromedia” and a key figure in early video art and expanded cinema, Tambellini believed art should serve as “the vital energy of society,” not a commodity. His practice—rooted in the metaphysical and political possibilities of blackness—continues to resonate as both formally daring and socially urgent.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with Robert Harris and Haden Guest. Harris is a filmmaker, educator, and former curator whose work spans decades of experimental and ethnographic film. Currently a professor at Fitchburg State University, he has held roles at Anthology Film Archives, MoMA PS1, and the New York State Summer School of the Arts. He has collaborated with Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, and Tambellini himself, and his films have screened internationally. Guest is the Director of the Harvard Film Archive where Tambellini’s extensive collection of films is archived. Guest is also a Senior Lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies and serves on the Board of Directors of The Aldo Tambellini Art Foundation.
Short Film Program
Moonblack
Directed by Aldo Tambellini (1969, 16 min.).
Moonblack is a hypnotic visual and sonic collage created by burning, scratching, and painting directly onto film. An extension of Tambellini’s Black Film series, it embodies the filmmaker’s belief that blackness signifies both spiritual expansion and radical protest.
Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn
Directed by Aldo Tambellini (1971–72, 15 min.).
Shot from Tambellini’s Brooklyn loft using early portable video technology, this observational work captures the energy of daily life at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues in Brooklyn—an early example of video as social document.
No Name Film
Directed by Aldo Tambellini (1969/2014, 19 min.).
Late in life Tambellini compiled 16mm film materials he originally created in the 1960s and reedited and reimagined them into this piece. It demonstrates his ongoing dialogue with his past work and his commitment to transformation through remixing.
The Royal Wedding
Directed by Aldo Tambellini (1981/2017, 24 min.).
On the day of Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding, Tambellini brought a camera crew and TV to a small diner in Central Square, Cambridge, filming customers as they watched the spectacle unfold. At once intimate and political, the piece reframes a global broadcast through a local, working-class lens.
