Zsigmond, Vilmos

ZSIGMOND, Vilmos

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Cinematographer. Nationality: Hungarian. Born: Szeged, 16 June 1930; credited as William Zsigmond on early films. Education: Attended Budapest Film School, graduated 1956. Career: 1956—escaped to Austria during Hungarian Revolution with the cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, then to the United States, 1957; worked as still photographer, laboratory technician, and camera assistant; 1963—first film as cinematographer; TV work includes The Protectors series, 1969–70, and the mini-series Flesh and Blood, 1979. Awards: Academy Award, for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977; British Academy Award, for The Deer Hunter, 1978.

Films as Cinematographer:

1957

Hungarn in Flammen (Revolt in Hungary ) (Erdelyi—doc) (co)

1963

The Sadist (Profile of Terror ) (James Landis); Living between Two Worlds (Johnson)

1964

What's up Front (Wehling); The Time Travelers (Melchior); The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Crazy Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (Steckler) (co)

1965

Rat Fink (My Soul Runs Naked ) (James Landis); The Nasty Rabbit (Spies A-Go-Go ) (James Landis); Deadwood '76 (James Landis); Tales of a Salesman (Russell); A Hot Summer Game (Bruner); Psycho A-Go-Go! (Adamson—revised version, The Fiend with the Electronic Brain )

1966

Road to Nashville (Zens)

1967

Mondo Mod (Perry—doc) (co)

1968

The Name of the Game Is Kill! (The Female Trap ) (Hellstrom); Jennie, Wife/Child (James Landis and Cohen)

1969

The Monitors (Shea); Hot Rod Action (McCabe); Five Bloody Graves (Gun Riders ) (Adamson); Futz! (O'Horgan); The Picasso Summer (Bourguignon)

1970

Horror of the Blood Monsters (Vampire Men of the Lost Planet ) (Adamson) (co)

1971

Red Sky at Morning (Goldstone); The Ski Bum (Clark); McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman); The Hired Hand (Fonda)

1972

Images (Altman); Deliverance (Boorman)

1973

The Long Goodbye (Altman); Scarecrow (Schatzberg); Cinderella Liberty (Rydell)

1974

The Sugarland Express (Spielberg); The Girl from Petrovka (Miller)

1976

Sweet Revenge (Schatzberg); Obsession (De Palma)

1977

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg) (co)

1978

The Last Waltz (Scorsese) (co); The Rose (Rydell); The Deer Hunter (Cimino)

1979

Winter Kills (Richert)

1980

Heaven's Gate (Cimino)

1981

Blow Out (De Palma)

1982

Jinxed (Siegel); The Border (Richardson) (co)

1983

Table for Five (Lieberman)

1984

The River (Rydell); No Small Affair (Schatzberg)

1985

Real Genius (Coolidge)

1987

The Witches of Eastwick (Miller)

1988

Journey to Spirit Island (L. Pal)

1989

Fat Man and Little Boy (Joffé)

1990

The Two Jakes (Nicholson); The Bonfire of the Vanities (De Palma)

1993

Sliver (Noyce)

1994

Maverick (R. Donner); Intersection (Rydell)

1995

The Crossing Guard (S. Penn); Assassins (R. Donner)

1996

The Ghost and the Darkness (Hopkins)

1998

Illegal Music (Zidel); Playing by Heart (Carroll)

1999

The Argument (Cammell)

Films as Director:

1992

The Long Shadow

Publications

By ZSIGMOND: articles—

American Cinematographer (Hollywood), June 1974.

Dialogue on Film (Beverly Hills, California), July 1974.

Dialogue on Film (Beverly Hills, California), October 1974.

Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Spring 1977.

American Cinematographer (Hollywood), January 1978.

On The Deer Hunter in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), October 1978.

American Film (Washington, D.C.), June 1979.

On Heaven's Gate in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), November 1980.

On Heaven's Gate in Millimeter (New York), January 1981.

Films and Filming (London), September 1982.

In Masters of Light: Conversations with Contemporary Cinematographers, by Dennis Schaefer and Larry Salvato, Berkeley, California, 1984.

American Cinematographer (Hollywood), June 1987.

Filmkultura (Budapest), vol. 25, no. 6, 1989.

American Cinematographer (Hollywood), November 1989.

American Cinematographer (Hollywood), April 1990.

American Cinematographer (Hollywood), November 1990.

American Film (Washington, D.C.), November 1990.

American Cinematographer (Hollywood), November 1991.

On ZSIGMOND: articles—

Lightman, Herb A., on Deliverance in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), August 1971.

Focus on Film (London), Autumn 1972, corrections in no. 13, 1973.

Lipnick, Edward, on The Long Goodbye in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), March 1973.

Gosnold, H. G., in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), March 1977.

Take One (Montreal), no. 2, 1978.

American Cinematographer (Hollywood), May 1978.

Carcassonne, P., and J. Fieschi, in Cinématographe (Paris), March 1979.

American Cinematographer (Hollywood), May 1979.

Lyman, D., in Filmmakers Monthly (Ward Hill, Massachusetts), June 1979.

Vallely, J., in Rolling Stone (New York), 21 February 1980.

Films and Filming (London), May 1980.

McCarthy, T., in Film Comment (New York), March/April 1984.

Patterson, Richard, in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), November 1984.

Betro, A., "Reaching Out to Europe," in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), June 1992.

Lueker, Rob, "At the Master's Feet," in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), February 1996.

Williams, D. E., "Night of the Hunters," in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), November 1996.

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Arriving in the United States in 1956 after escaping from Hungary with fellow cameraman and sometime collaborator Laszlo Kovacs, Vilmos Zsigmond toiled in the low-budget exploitation field throughout the 1960s, and then emerged as a major director of photography in the 1970s and 1980s, working with the directors Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Michael Cimino, Jerry Schatzberg, John Boorman, Mark Rydell and, most often, Robert Altman. Like Kovacs, Zsigmond established himself with a few intriguing lower-case credits, making his debut—credited as William Zsigmond—as a cinematographer on The Sadist, a high-energy black-and-white psycho picture based on the incident that inspired Badlands. Zsigmond went on to work with the incredibly strange Ray Dennis Steckler on The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Crazy Mixed-Up Zombies!!? which has moments so awful they could pass for surreal. After such oddities as the documentary Mondo Mod, the psychotic desert picture The Name of the Game Is Kill!, the improvisational science-fiction comedy The Monitors, and the off-Broadway adaption Futz!, Zsigmond fell in with Al Adamson—a poverty-stricken auteur who made Ray Dennis Steckler look talented—for Five Bloody Graves and Horror of the Blood Monsters, the former a horror Western narrated by Death, the latter a patchwork of tinted Filipino science-fiction footage with John Carradine explaining the plot.

Something about the deserts of The Sadist, The Name of the Game Is Kill!, and Five Bloody Graves must have registered, for Zsigmond's breakthrough from the blood monsters and psycho-a-go-go girls came with a series of Western or Western-flavored movies in 1970, commencing with James Goldstone's coming-of-age drama set in New Mexico during World War II, Red Sky at Morning and taking in Peter Fonda's rugged, ragged "acid Western" The Hired Hand. The most important of these films was Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, in which Zsigmond captured the magic of the muddy small town and caught Altman's stranded characters in the uncharacteristic snowy wastes of the film's western Canada setting. For Altman, Zsigmond then tackled the seductive but hollow post-Chandler Los Angeles of The Long Goodbye, which also includes a side-trip to a lushly corrupt Mexico; the pristine Scots autumn backdrop to Susannah York's nervous breakdown in Images ; and the teeming canvas of the over-populated but glowing A Wedding. Meanwhile, he also established relationships with Steven Spielberg, transferring from the Altmanesque road movieness of The Sugarland Express to the Oscar-winning lightshow of Close Encounters of the Third Kind ; Jerry Schatzberg, also on the road in Scarecrow and homing in for the miscalculated Sweet Revenge and No Small Affair ; Mark Rydell, from the grubby Cinderella Liberty through the showbiz sleaze of The Rose to the nouveau Western of The River ; Brian De Palma, at his iciest and most intriguingly Hitchcock-cum-Antonioniesque in Obsession and Blow Out (prompting Zsigmond to far more whirling effects than Spielberg's aliens did); and Michael Cimino, stepping from the un-Altmanesque ethnic marriages and rat-trap horrors of The Deer Hunter to the expansive western crowds and massacres of Heaven's Gate. That a career could encompass Five Bloody Graves and Heaven's Gate is bizarre enough, but even stranger is the continuity between the cheap disaster and the super-produced disaster, both of which are marked by Zsigmond's daring look. Daring, because it can sometimes seem pretty—pretty enough to win an Oscar—but more often gets accused of being muddy, fuzzy, foggy, and indistinct, even ugly. It could be argued, however, that Zsigmond's contribution to the Western and the western-set road movie—including, besides the films cited above, Tony Richardson's draggy The Border and John Boorman's backwoods Deliverance —was crucial to the evolution, even the death, of the form in the 1970s and 1980s, imposing a countercultural hairiness on the straight-arrow Americanism of the genre. Certainly, as a Hungarian, Zsigmond has been involved in a succession of almost archetypal American movies—the Eastern European heritage touched on only in The Deer Hunter and The Girl from Petrovka —that have taken him into the most prized American genre forms—horror, Western, private eye, family weepie (Table for Five ), rock 'n' roll concert (The Last Waltz )—and even, in Winter Kills, near the White House. He has a sometimes-exercised gift for fantasy that dates back to the Incredibly Strange Creatures days and is undaunted by the special effects of Close Encounters or The Witches of Eastwick. He has been somewhat in eclipse in the late 1980s and 1990s, but he is well-enough established as a proficient craftsman as well as an unimpeachable artist, to still land the plum assignments. His penchant for being attached to famous disasters persists with The Bonfire o the Vanities, for which De Palma steered Zsigmond through a memorably redundant tour-de-force opening shot. He has turned out a few entirely anonymous but slick jobs (Sliver, Maverick, and Assassins ) between ambitious oddments (Fat Man and Little Boy and The Crossing Guard ). In the late 1990s, Zsigmond continued to turn in creditable efforts. The pleasant clarity of his images and lighting in Playing by Heart provide a warm and reassuring setting for the light melodrama and comedy of this updated woman's picture. The Ghost and the Darkness called for a substantially different approach. This true story of man-eating African lions demanded just the combination of National Geographic photographic painting and expressionistic stylization that Zsigmond employs. As in an unfortunately large number of the projects he has worked on in his career, his cinematography is the most successfully conceived and executed element in an otherwise very ordinary and forgettable production.

—Kim Newman, updated by R. Barton Palmer