A moving image work. The 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). 

Note: Natalie Kalmus was the ex-wife of technicolour inventor Herbert Kalmus, and was the colour consultant for hundreds of colour films.

Exhibitions: solo show at Paradise Row (2013); solo show at Gallery 44 (Toronto, 2014); solo show at George Eastman Museum (Rochester NY, 2015); solo show at Clifford Gallery (Hamilton NY, 2016); group exhibition 'As Above, So Below: Portals, visions, demons & mystics', Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, April-July 2017).  Screenings: mini-retrospective at the Lincoln Centre, NY, as part of the New York Film Festival (2013); International Rotterdam Film Festival (2014); selected for international competition New Horizons International Film Festival (Poland 2014); Mini-retrospective screening, DIM Cinema, The Cinematheque (Vancouver 2015); Mini-retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery (London 2016); screening at 18th Bratislava International Film Festival (2016). Publications: ‘Reflections & Refractions’ Black Dog Publishing in association with Gallery 44, 2016, with essays by Esther Leslie, Genevieve Yue and Katherine McKay

Satz, Aura

A moving image work. The 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). Note: Natalie Kalmus was the ex-wife of technicolour inventor Herbert Kalmus, and was the colour consultant for hundreds of colour films. Exhibitions: solo show at Paradise Row (2013); solo show at Gallery 44 (Toronto, 2014); solo show at George Eastman Museum (Rochester NY, 2015); solo show at Clifford Gallery (Hamilton NY, 2016); group exhibition 'As Above, So Below: Portals, visions, demons & mystics', Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, April-July 2017). Screenings: mini-retrospective at the Lincoln Centre, NY, as part of the New York Film Festival (2013); International Rotterdam Film Festival (2014); selected for international competition New Horizons International Film Festival (Poland 2014); Mini-retrospective screening, DIM Cinema, The Cinematheque (Vancouver 2015); Mini-retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery (London 2016); screening at 18th Bratislava International Film Festival (2016). Publications: ‘Reflections & Refractions’ Black Dog Publishing in association with Gallery 44, 2016, with essays by Esther Leslie, Genevieve Yue and Katherine McKay

Royal College of Art Research Repository

AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST AURA SATZSubmitted by Rachel Pikus, March 25, 2015On display at George Eastman House through April 26, 2015, the installation Eyelids LeakingLight features two recent works by the London-based artist Aura Satz. Featuring close-ups of eyes fromearly experiments in color printing, Chromatic Aberration (2014) uses film elements from GeorgeEastman House to explore the aesthetics of “color fringing.” Doorway for Natalie Kalmus (2013) is anaudiovisual work that transforms a Bell & Howell lamphouse used for color grading into a grotto ofprismatic lights and clanking doorways. The work pays homage to Technicolor’s colorconsultant Natalie Kalmus, whose name appears in the credits of hundreds of color filmsincluding The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gone With the Wind (1939), and The Red Shoes (1948). Satz has createdworks that engage with a wide range of technologies throughout the twentieth century, but the twoworks currently on display at Eastman House highlight her investment in questions surrounding earlycolor film technology.Satz’s work cuts across film, sound, performance, and sculpture. Her art focuses on the complexintersections between the history, technology, and aesthetics of media, while exploring the ways inwhich they inform human perception and agency. Satz is also interested in bringing to the fore keyfemale figures that are largely excluded from mainstream historical discourse in an ongoingengagement with the question of women’s contributions to labor, technology and scientific knowledge.Often involving extensive research, consultation and collaboration, her work is informed by thehistories of media and the ways in which these technologies overlap. Satz has performed, exhibitedand screened her work nationally and internationally at the Tate Modern, Tate Britain, BarbicanCentre, ICA, BFI Southbank, Whitechapel Gallery, Oberhausen Short Film Festival, International FilmFestival Rotterdam, Paradise Row gallery, and the New York Film Festival.Ryan Conrath, one of the curators of Eyelids Leaking Light, recently spoke with Dr. Satz about her work.RECENT POSTSArt House Theater DayDirector's Note: OurInvaluable DocentsSight Reading Challenge:Wrap-Up and Week FiveWinner!In Memoriam: NathanLyons, 1930–2016100 years ago, GeorgeEastman did not go toWyoming...Sight Reading ChallengeFive: Illusion, and WeekFour WinnerJason Lazarus: Too Hard ToKeepSummer Intern Update: My       CALENDAR FILMS BLOG STORE DONATEABOUT VISIT COLLECTIONS EXHIBITIONS EVENTS LEARN JOIN & GIVEConvert webpages or entire websites to PDF - Use PDFmyURL!Ryan Conrath: How did you become interested in color?Aura Satz: My interest in color followed on from a body of works I made about sound and soundtechnologies. I have always been fascinated by the inherent vibratory and unsettling qualities ofsound that make it unwieldy to write or encode. There is a sense of approximation or loss ofauthenticity, an inevitable interference of noise and distortion. Looking closely at color made merealize how inherently unstable it is. Colors will inexorably fade, dissolve, and degrade, which makes itimpossible to fully systematize or standardize. Color is highly unreliable and subjective on the level ofperception; it is difficult to translate effectively into language or describe with any precision. Color hasoften been accused of being distracting, disruptive, garish, child-like or feminine. In working withforms of notation, transcription and reproduction, I am drawn to those points at which sound or colorreveal an intrinsic resistance to codification.I am also very much committed to revisiting the undervalued (and mostly underpaid) contribution ofwomen to the history of labor and technology. It was through this research that I came across thewomen who hand-colored and hand-stenciled early color films at the turn of the century. This in turnled me to explore the history of Natalie Kalmus. She was the color consultant for Technicolor (and wifeof Technicolor inventor Herbert Kalmus), and worked on most of the classic films we associate withhyper-saturated Technicolor. She also wrote about composing color scores for narrative films, muchlike a piece of music. Sadly, none of her scores survive, but this concept of a “color score” reallySummer Intern Update: MyExperience as aDepartment ofPhotography InternGeorge Eastman's DentalDispensary Celebrates 100YearsSight Reading ChallengeFour: Cropping Matters,and Week Three WinnerConvert webpages or entire websites to PDF - Use PDFmyURL!appealed to me. Intriguingly, the Bell & Howell color-correction machine used punched paper tape toencode the color sequence, much like the perforated paper familiar from pianolas or the punchedcards of early computers. I have made works featuring both of these and found the idea of color datastored in punched tape highly resonant with a musical score, and tangentially connected to earlierinventions such as Rimington or Wilfred’s Color Organs. RC: You are deeply invested in so many of these complex questions around the history andtechnology of film, in an almost scientific way at times. At the same time, ambiguity andindeterminacy lie at the heart of your work. How do you make room for both of these impulses asyou proceed with a given project?AS: I am really interested in exploring modes of sustained attention, of close looking and listening.This is clearly echoed in the scientific methods for examining and studying the world. Several of myfilms employ the microscope or magnifying lens in order to facilitate a more intense, at times almostdisorienting tactile experience. This allows viewers to see something from a different and unexpectedangle. Some of my projects make reference to historical subjects who worked in this way, such as thewomen hand-painting each individual film frame, or in Her Luminous Distance, a project I made aboutwomen astronomers studying small differences of star patterns on near identical photographic plates.At the same time, I want to facilitate such a mode of perception in the viewer by offering an  almosttrance-like experience through the act of close attentive looking. By looking in this way, one begins todiscern visual and aural patterns, like an underlying code. My works encourage a reading that is stilluncertain of its intended purpose, a visual or auditory meandering. As I mentioned earlier, I amattracted to those subjects which allow me to reveal a certain resistance to codification. I like to de-familiarize the sense of scale, of agency, or of structural stability. In Doorway for Natalie Kalmus thevalves or doorways which control the amount of color become hinges which do not commit to atopographic inside or an outside. The camera is continually shifting position, hovering, not quite at anexit or an entry point. Likewise in Chromatic Aberration the close-ups of eyes in early color filmexperiments are both from behind the camera lens and in front of the screen, inside the perceptualbody and outside of it. I was inspired by a scene in Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 film A Matter of Lifeand Death (US: Stairway to Heaven), where the transition from the reality of color to the black and whiteof the afterworld is conveyed from the viewpoint of David Niven’s eyelid, from inside the body, behindthe eyes. Technology is clearly a tool for extending and projecting outwards, but it also collapses orfolds back into the body, blurring boundaries in the object/subject relationship. So to answer yourquestion, I am interested in a scientific approach to uncertainty and indeterminacy, withoutnecessarily aiming for resolution.Convert webpages or entire websites to PDF - Use PDFmyURL! RC: Along similar lines, can you talk a bit about your approach toward archival materials?  I amparticularly interested in this because so much of the archive is about notation, accounting, andcategorizing.AS: In my research processes I delve into history, but I like to think of my work as dialogic, whether Iam in conversation with the past, encountering a material relic or artifact, or in dialogue withcontemporary collaborators, musicians, historians, archivists, etc. To me these past moments inhistory, the technological or archival objects I investigate, or the people I approach as collaborators orconsultants, are all elements which speak back to me.  So I suppose I see my work as attending tomodes of storing, archiving, inscribing, and bringing these elements into speech, both in terms of mysubject matter, but also in my conceptual framework. My films about sound reproduction devices arevery much about these language containers which preserve the voice and then play it back, as well asthe slippages, distortions, glitches and interferences that are integral to this process. For example, myproject about Daphne Oram and her invention of a graphic sound machine centers on a notationsystem that translates writing directly into sound or music. The film is simultaneously about hernotation system, her musical output, her writing, her invention, and her voice, as much as it is aboutthe conversation I am having with her in the past, through her work, and how I am to certain degreeConvert webpages or entire websites to PDF - Use PDFmyURL!spoken through by her.My interest in working with the early color film experiments at George Eastman House came from afascination with technologies at patent stage, that are not quite successful yet, which still reveal ahesitant experimental quality. I consulted the archivist James Layton in trying to identify which earlytechnologies might allow for more color fringing effects, and came up with the Two-Color Kodachromeprocess, in particular the test shots done in 1922, which were not at the service of a cinematicnarrative. The purpose of these was most likely just to try out how effective the color film might be inconveying skin tone, which also brings to mind later calibration reel leaders known in film labs asChina Girl (a few frames of an anonymous woman accompanied by color bars), but also AndyWarhol’s Screen Tests.I wanted to try and rewind to the moment when people had not yet seen themselves in color film, andto evoke the de-familiarizing experience of seeing oneself reflected in color, perhaps distorted,abstracted, and therefore open to a more surreal and dream-like inner vision. I was keen to use thearchival reels in a way that highlighted the materiality of the film strip, so that through magnificationyou would start to see what happens on the surface of the print, such as the fringing effects ofmisaligned colors. In doing so, one can become lost in haptic qualities of the film grain. I was equallykeen to make the film lab technologies that I was using to handle this reel speak back through thefootage, so the contact printer blinks back at the footage of the eyes. The process of handling thearchival footage feeds into the rhythm of the film, providing an acoustic rhythmic pulse and aneditorial pacing which is not quite animation but somehow disrupts the framerate, from a slowstroboscopic flash to a flickering eye blinking, much like the flutter of an insect trapped in a peep hole.Convert webpages or entire websites to PDF - Use PDFmyURL!RC: What role do you think experimental cinema has played in suggesting alternative directions forcolor in film? What other artists/filmmakers have you drawn inspiration from in this sense?AS: As I said earlier, what draws me to use color is the impossibility of truly fixing it, and the potentialof creating a perceptual experience that somehow exposes this. The doorways or peep-holes ontocolor in the two films at George Eastman House highlight the impossibility of preventing one colorfrom bleeding into the next, either in the actual print, through a doorway crack, in the editorial pacingwhich on occasions rises to a flicker, or in the afterimages that are created through acceleratedchromatic juxtaposition. These color fields become an unstable environment that draws the viewer inand washes them over. Rather than systematically structuring or fixing color it revels in color’s abilityfor dissolution.There are so many fascinating and completely unexpected crossovers between more experimentalpractices and the more mainstream film industry. For Doorway for Natalie Kalmus I was inspired by thehistory of Technicolor, but also by the horror films of Dario Argento, and most crucially, theexperimental filmmaker Paul Sharits. I am really drawn to his work with flicker and color after-images(such as Shutter Interface), but his color scores are especially astounding. They are scores andnotations for films, as well as artworks using the actual filmstrips themselves, which he termed FrozenFilm Frames. These are closely aligned with color organs and some of the scores made by AlexanderWallace Rimington, or the ones I imagine Natalie Kalmus might have made for films such as The Wizardof Oz or Gone with the Wind. For Chromatic Aberration I had several points of inspiration: Powell andPressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death mentioned before, but also Peeping Tom and the importance ofConvert webpages or entire websites to PDF - Use PDFmyURL!image seen through the camera lens, including the grid. I was also inspired by Marie Ellen Bute’sfilms, and Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight. To me these unusual crossovers between mainstream and avant-garde or experimental practices are of interest precisely because, again, it is about disruptingboundaries, examining what is usually overlooked, and finding improbable anachronistic connectionsin order to dismantle hierarchies. George Eastman House is excited to welcome Dr. Satz to Rochester on April 16, 2015. At 6 p.m. thatday, she will deliver a talk at the Dryden Theatre. To supplement the show at Eastman House, Satz willalso present a screening of several of her other works at the University of Rochester, in the GowenRoom (Wilson Commons). For details on the on-campus event, please contact Ryan Conrath(rconrath@geh.org). Wednesday, March 25, 2015Rachel Pikus's blogConvert webpages or entire websites to PDF - Use PDFmyURL!© 2015 George Eastman Museum      900 East AvenueRochester, NY 14607(585) 271-3361Contact Us Sign up for e-news:user@example.comSign Up✉ADMISSIONMuseumAdults $14Seniors (62+) $12Students (with ID) $5Children 12 & under FreeMembers FreeDryden TheatreGeneral $8Members $6Students (with ID) $4Dryden Kids Free for 17 &underHOURSMuseumTues.–Sat. 10 a.m.–5 p.m.Sun. 11 a.m.–5 p.m.Buy TicketsDryden TheatreFilm screenings dailyTues.–Sat. 8 p.m. Sun. 2 p.m. Times may vary. Check filmlistings.QUICK LINKSDryden TheatreBlogPress RoomContactEmploymentHours & AdmissionMembershipPrivacy PolicyTerms of UseConvert webpages or entire websites to PDF - Use PDFmyURL!

Doorway for Natalie Kalmus

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