He won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind as well as the BAFTA Award for Best Cinematography for The Deer Hunter.[7][8] He also won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Cinematography for a Miniseries or a Special for the HBO miniseries Stalin.[6]
Zsigmond was born in Szeged, Hungary, the son of Bozena (née Illichman), an administrator, and Vilmos Zsigmond, a soccer player and coach.[7][9][15] He became interested in photography at age 17 after an uncle had given him The Art of Light, a book of black-and-white photographs taken by Hungarian photographer Eugene Dulovits,[16][17][18] but under the Soviet-imposed government of the Hungarian People's Republic he was not allowed to study the subject because his family was considered bourgeois.[7][16][17] Instead, Zsigmond worked in a factory, bought a camera and taught himself how to take pictures, going on to organize a camera club for the workers.[8][15][16] As a result he won the respect of local commissars and was allowed to study cinema at the Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest and received an MA in cinematography.[8][15][16] He worked for five years in a Budapest feature film studio becoming director of photography.[15]
Zsigmond, along with his friend and fellow student László Kovács, borrowed a 35-millimeter camera from their school and chronicled the events of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in Budapest by hiding the camera in a shopping bag and shooting footage through a hole they had cut in the bag.[6][7][16] The two men shot thirty thousand feet of film and escaped to Austria shortly afterwards.[7][8][15] In 1958 Zsigmond and Kovács arrived in the United States as political refugees and sold the footage to CBS for a network documentary on the revolution narrated by Walter Cronkite.[6][7][8]
In 1962, Zsigmond became a naturalized citizen of the United States.[19] He settled in Los Angeles and worked in photo labs as a technician and photographer.[8] The first film he worked on in the United States was the 1963 black-and-white exploitation filmThe Sadist, starring Arch Hall Jr.[8][16] Throughout the 1960s, he worked on many low-budget independent and educational films as he attempted to break into the film industry.[9][15] Some of the films that he worked on during this period credited him as "William Zsigmond", including The Sadist, the classic horror B movieThe Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies,[9][20] and the Second City satirical science fiction movie The Monitors.[21]
Zsigmond's television work includes the HBO miniseries Stalin, for which he won the 1993 Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Cinematography for a Miniseries or a Special.[6][12] He was nominated for an Emmy for his work on 2001 miniseries The Mists of Avalon.[6] Zsigmond also shot 24 episodes of The Mindy Project between 2012 and 2014.[12][20][25]
In 2011 Zsigmond co-founded the Global Cinematography Institute in Los Angeles, along with fellow cinematographer Yuri Neyman.[6][9][27] The Institute provides an advanced cinematography educational program for postgraduate students and veteran filmmakers.[27]
He was a longtime user and endorser of Tiffen filters, and is associated with the technique known as flashing or pre-fogging, which involves carefully exposing the film negative to a small, controlled amount of light in order to create a muted color palette.[9][20]
Death
On January 1, 2016, Zsigmond died at his home in Big Sur, California, at the age of 85.[6][9]
^Bergan, Ronald (January 4, 2016). "Vilmos Zsigmond obituary". The Guardian. London. Retrieved November 1, 2018. Zsigmond, who won an Oscar for his work on Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), was responsible for the distinctive look of many of the best Hollywood movies of the 1970s, starting with Altman's McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971).
^"Vilmos Zsigmond, cinematographer – obituary". The Daily Telegraph. London. May 30, 2016. Retrieved November 1, 2018. Vilmos Zsigmond, who has died aged 85, was a Hungarian cinematographer celebrated for his work during the 1970s and 1980s with directors such as Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman and Woody Allen...His camera skills were used to great effect in seminal 1970s works such as Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978) and John Boorman's Deliverance (1972).
^Patterson, John (January 6, 2016). "Vilmos Zsigmond: the cinematographer who transformed how films look". The Guardian. London. Retrieved November 1, 2018. We think of Zsigmond, who died on New Year's Day aged 85, as one of the leading photographic lights of the Hollywood New Wave.
^ abcdefghiAnderson, Tre'vell (January 3, 2016). "Vilmos Zsigmond, Oscar-winning cinematographer, dead at 85". Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles. Retrieved November 1, 2018. Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, revered as one of the most influential cinematographers in film history for his work on several classic films, including "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "The Deer Hunter," died Friday.
^ abSragow, Michael (August 26, 2010). "Vilmos Zsigmond, the image-master". The Baltimore Sun. Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Retrieved November 1, 2018.
