Doorway for Natalie Kalmus is a film centred around the use of colour in moving image technology, exploring the disorienting technicolour prismatic effects of the lamp house of a 35mm colour film printer. Through minute shifts across an abstract colour spectrum, punctuated by a mechanical soundtrack, the film evokes kaleidoscopic perceptual after-images (bringing to mind Paul Sharits, Dario Argento and the Wizard of Oz). Natalie Kalmus was the ex-wife of technicolour inventor Herbert Kalmus, and was the colour consultant for hundreds of colour films, including The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, the Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and many more. She would draw up colour scores for each film, like music scores, according to her theories of "Colour Consciousness". She also authored a short article entitled "Doorway onto another world", in which she described her sister’s deathbed experience of seeing deceased family members.

Exhibitions:

1 Nov - 7 Dec 2013

'Colour Opponent Process', Solo exhibition at Paradise Row Gallery

Paradise Row presents 'Colour Opponent Process', a solo exhibition of works by Aura Satz. For her first ever commercial gallery exhibition, Satz will premiere a new film 'Doorway for Natalie Kalmus'. Centred around the use of colour in moving image technology, Satz will explore the disorienting technicolour prismatic effects effects of the lamp house of a 35mm colour film printer. Alongside the film, Satz will also present a number of 35mm film-strip 'colour code' works, inspired by the colour scores of Natalie Kalmus, and the perforated paper colour encoding employed by The Bell and Howell Additive Lamp house.

21 November 2013 7pm

Aura Satz will be conversation with Prof. Esther Leslie discussing abstraction, colour, and the contributions of female labour to the early colour film industry, at Paradise Row Gallery.

Esther Leslie is Professor in Political Aesthetics, Birkbeck, University of London and author of Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant garde (2002), Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry, (2005), Walter Benjamin (2007).

14 March - 19 April 2014

'Colour Opponent Process', Solo show at Gallery 44, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto

24 January - 26 April 2015

'Eyelids Leaking Light'

4 - 31 May 2015

Solo presentation at Projection Space Suburban, Rotterdam

Screenings:

3-7 October 2013

Screened at the 51st New York Film Festival 'Views from the Avant-garde', curated by Mark McElhatten

Our popular yearly touchstone for experimental film returns with 45 programs in glorious Super-8, 16mm and 35mm film and HD formats. Many familiar faces have returned and this year's slate feature 45 new artists as well as several mini-retrospectives of artists including, Aura Satz, Lois Patino, Sandro Aguilar, and Jean-Paul Kelly. Views will also offer special tributes to the late Stom Sogo and Anne Robertson, whose work is a testimony to the power of a cinema that is fearless, confidential and inextinguishable. Curated by Mark McElhatten.

25 and 26 January 2014

Screenings at the 43rd edition Rotterdam Film Festival as part of the 'Signals Regained' programme

24 July 24 - 3 August 2014

Selected for the 'European Short Film Competition' as part of the 14th T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival, Wroclaw, Poland

13 May 2015

'Soundfigures: Films by Aura Satz'

A selection of films by Aura Satz, programmed by Michele Smith, DIM Cinema, Vancouver Cinametheque

(Near) extinct technologies make sound visible in this program of shorts by London-based artist Aura Satz that delve into ideas of knowledge, memory, and communication. On a Chladni Plate, a device that marked the birth of acoustics, grains of sand, moving like Busby Berkeley dancers, form intricate patterns in response to changing sound frequencies, their shapes recalling the utopian quest for a 'pure,' onomatopoeic alphabet. Wax cylinder recordings combine with modern scientific instruments to animate a text by Rainer Maria Rilke on the possibility of hearing the dead by playing their skulls with a gramophone needle. A Ruben's Tube translates a histrionic voice-over into a standing wave of small flames, provoking unexpected associations, from the biblical burning bush to various acts of ventriloquism in pop culture. Breaking its long silence, the Oramics Machine plays hand-drawn compositions by its inventor, electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram. Kaleidoscopic effects in the lamphouse of a 35mm film printer honour Natalie Kalmus, colour consultant on masterpieces of the Technicolor era. Chromatic distortions in early colour-film tests are revealed through the eyes of the George Eastman family and old Hollywood stars. In a dramatic finale, Satz and experimental filmmaker Lis Rhodes encode their voices as abstract light patterns on 16mm mono and 35mm stereo filmstrips in a collaborative exploration of sound-image synchronicity.

18 Feb 2016

'Between the Bullet and the Hole' (Plus Other Shorts) + Q&A at Whitechapel Gallery, London

Aura Satz presents the UK premiere of 'Between the Bullet and the Hole', her latest short film which examines the role of women in ballistic research, early computing and pattern perception in warfare. Presented alongside her works focusing on memory, notation, encryption and gender, the event also features an in conversation with special guests Morgan Quaintance and David Alan Grier.

7th March 2017

'Between the Bullet and the Hole' (Plus Other Shorts) at HOME Manchester

Followed by Q&A with Chris Paul Daniels

Part of: Artist Talks https://homemcr.org/event/artist-talks/