The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, January 11-18
Black TV (1968)
Directed by Aldo Tambellini
The Italian-American artist, filmmaker, and poet Tambellini is known best for working with black. His most celebrated films comprise a seven-work suite called the Black Film cycle and combine abstract impressions hand-drawn and scratched directly onto 16mm film stock with firsthand registers that comment allusively on the meaning of “black” throughout the world. Tambellini, at age 86, still continues to use black in his work both as a color and as a concept, which he has described in sweeping, primal terms. In an interview conducted in 1967, during the creation of the Black Films (all of which have recently been restored by the Harvard Film Archive), Tambellini variously characterized black as “a state of being blind and more aware,” “a oneness with birth,” and “the expansion of consciousness in all directions.” His films sublimely illustrate these capacities.
Following this past Tuesday’s screening of six of the Black Films, Anthology Film Archives will screen the series’s concluding film, Black TV, together with three other Tambellini pieces (two of which further illustrate the powers of blackness, the third of which further illustrates the power of television). Tambellini will appear in person. His split-screen, ten-minute-long Black TV presents, with varying levels of static, two television monitors across which play a variety of sounds and images registered between 1964 and 1968. These fragments of a violent and tumultuous time include references to Vietnam War casualties, to Robert F. Kennedy’s death, to police beating back crowds in Chicago, and to Nixon’s ascendance to President. A human face riven with pain appears on one side of the screen while the words “Where is Prejudice?” and a billowing American flag appear on the other. Blackness surrounds the images throughout and acts as a unifying presence. Aaron Cutler (January 12, 7:30pm at Anthology Film Archives’s Tambellini retrospective)