Tribute: Vilmos Zsigmond

Close Encounters

Note: Vilmos Zsigmond will be attending the 2011 Milwaukee Film Festival! Please check the Filmmakers in Attendance section for further information.

Providing the cinematic eye to renowned directors such as Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman and Brian De Palma, Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, is the unsung hero in an extensive list of classic American films.

Zsigmond started in film by attending the State Academy of Theatre and Film Art in Budapest, Hungary, working as a still photographer and laboratory technician before moving to motion pictures. After heroically filming the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he fled the country on foot with more than 30,000 feet of film, eventually landing in a refugee camp in New Jersey in 1957.

His career in the United States began by working in educational films, in the television com- mercial industry and on low-budget drive-in movies, until his break into Hollywood came as Director of Photography for Altman’s classic McCabe & Mrs. Miller in 1971. Zsigmond went on to shoot cinematic landmarks such as Deliverance (1972), The Long Goodbye (1973), The Deer Hunter (1978) and Blow Out (1981).

Regarded by his peers as one of the most influential cinematographers in the history of motion pictures for his stunning use of light and color to capture the supernatural, Zsigmond has received four Oscar nominations (as recently as 2006 for The Black Dahlia), and he won
the Academy Award for Best Cinematography in 1978 for the sci-fi blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In 1999, Zsigmond received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers for his dedication and contribution to the world of film.

This program is generously supported by: