The Love of CINEMA

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"To make a good movie you need to learn a lot from the dutch painters and the realistic painters, Leonardo, Caravaggio, they saw the world in a different way, in a poetic realistic way, they  never painted double shadows, everyhthing has to be single shadow. "

-VILMOS ZSIGMOND

Vilmos Zsigmond may not be a household name but within the industry, he was a highly honored practitioner of the filming arts.

Zsigmond was born in June 16, 1930 in the Stalinist days in Szeged, Hungary, the son of Bozena , an administrator, and Vilmos Zsigmond, a celebrated soccer player and coach. He was working in a factory not knowing what to do with his life so he went to the party secretary and ask to  study something. So he began giving photography classes to the working class. Then he studied cinema at the Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest. He received an MA in cinematography. 

He worked for five years in a Budapest feature film studio becoming "director of photography." Together with his friend and fellow student László Kovács, he chronicled the events of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in Budapest on thirty thousand feet of film and then escaped to Austria shortly afterwards.
This early chapter of his professional life, with some of their footage of the revolution, constitutes the opening segment of the bio-documentary by PBS's Independent Lens (2009) called No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos.

He gained prominence during the 1970s after being hired by Robert Altman as cinematographer for McCabe & Mrs. Miller. 

Subsequent major films he shot include Altman's The Long Goodbye,John Boorman's Deliverance 

and Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the latter of which won him the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. 

Zsigmond worked with Brian De Palma on Obsession, Blow Out, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and The Black Dahlia, with Michael Cimino on The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate, with Richard Donner on Maverick and Assassins, with Kevin Smith on Jersey Girl, withGeorge Miller on The Witches Of Eastwick and with Woody Allen on Melinda and Melinda, Cassandra's Dream, and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.

He was a longtime user and endorser of Tiffen filters, and is also associated with the technique known as 'flashing' or 'pre-fogging'. This involves carefully exposing the film negative to a small, controlled amount of light in order to create a muted colour palette, pioneered by cinematographer Freddie Young on the 1966 film The Deadly Affair.

Zsigmond has a special fondness for one film he worked on, The Deer Hunter. 

“It is a complete film and I like everything about it. I like the cast; I like what the actors did; I like the directing. It was a great collaborative effort. I remember how happy I was when doing that film because I had a great time with Michael Cimino, a talented director with many good ideas. He lets the people around him be collaborators and I had 100 percent input in that movie. Michael didn’t always tell me how to set up the light or set up the camera, he left it up to me most of the time. Sometimes we did it together, and sometimes he just let me do it. He gave me a lot of freedom in that sense.”

-Vilmos Zsigmond

"Our style ,what we learned in Budapest was a poetic realism , it´s real but has poetry in it. It is better than real, find a location and  you fit the scene, the movie and the style."

-Vilmos Zsigmond

"I am not against a digital revolution, we should use that technology to make better films, we have to make good movies, like we used to do. "

-Vilmos Zsigmond

Freedom like that is earned the hard way, by learning the trade and showing your capability over many films. 

Zsigmond was  nominated four times for an Academy Award — he won the Best Cinematography Award for Close Encounters — and twice for primetime Emmy Awards, winning once for Stalin. 

"I always learn from going to see other movies, i still feel that the best artistic movies are still made in Europe. Unfortunately the United States go in a totally different direction, i hope they will go back someday for better images in movies."

-Vilmos Zsigmond

Throughout his career, which started in 1956 covertly filming the revolution in his native Hungary, Zsigmond has studied and practiced the art of lighting. Taking his inspiration from the classic artists, he cautions new cinematographers,

“You have to remember all the time there is a big difference between a guy painting the wall in a room with a roller and an actual painter doing a painting like Rembrandt using a brush.”

-Vilmos Zsigmond

" Cinema , it is an art form, effects are overtaking everything, i think that the problem is, films started with images, we are forgetting about that, the stories are about the people.... the effects are becoming the people, only explosions , what happened??."

-Vilmos Zsigmond

Nowadays the film industry has converted to digital imaging and many  “old-school” cinematographers don´t agree with this change.

Should the artists of light, like Zsigmond, have to adapt to digital? 

“I don’t think it will make a difference to what I am doing. A digital camera is just a tool. I can’t understand why people are so afraid of digital cameras. Still, some younger or newer cinematographers, working with digital cameras, may not have experience in lighting. We were trained to create the mood of a scene, mainly with lighting. I shot a digital film, a dance film, and I lit it the same way I would light a film movie. I don’t think anybody could tell that I shot it on digital because that’s the way I approached it.”

-Vilmos Zsigmond

“The good thing is that you can easily get a digital camera and practice doing low-budget movies, you can even do a personal movie with a small cast in an inexpensive way. It is good that students can get ahold of these cameras. But the bad thing is that in order to become a great cinematographer you have to know about lighting. Too many digital cinematographers today don’t pay attention to lighting. Lighting does make the difference. A good movie, if it’s lit right, creates the mood in every scene.”

-Vilmos Zsigmond

 “You have to accept the idea that for a good feature film, the lighting has to fit the mood of the story. Those who start out learning cinematography digitally can have a problem. You turn the camera on and you already have an image, even when the scene isn’t lit right. So it’s easy for a producer, looking at the monitor, to say, ‘Let’s shoot, I really like what I see.’ As a cinematographer, you might have a hard time convincing people that it would be better if you lit the scene properly. That’s a big problem, to learn to do the right lighting for each scene.”

-Vilmos Zsigmond

The basic challenge in cinematography has always been the use of light to create or enhance a scene. The ability to “paint with light” differentiates the master from the acolyte. 

“This is also true for digital movies like Slumdog Millionaire or 127 Hours by Anthony Dod Mantle. I like his use of lighting, which looks more natural than mine. His close ups are really marvelous. His use of a tiny digital camera is important. He uses cameras that he can put into small spaces very close to the actor’s face.”

-Vilmos Zsigmond

Vilmos Zsigmond passed away on January 1, 2016. R.I.P. He will always be remembered by the emotions he brought to every frame of the scene in every movie he made. He will certainly be remembered by the Academy on this years Oscar Ceremony. Don´t be surprised if the Winner of Best Cinematography dedicates his or her award to him.

"be ..very real.... that is what i learned in film school, be like Vittorio De Sica"

-Vilmos Zsigmond