Vilmos Zsigmond, 1930-2016

Susannah York and Cathryn Harrison in Images, dir­ec­ted by Robert Altman, 1972

One of the many lim­it­a­tions of an early edu­ca­tion in auteurist-based cinephil­ia is that you tend to look exclus­ively for dir­ect­ori­al sig­na­tures. Or you tend to look at just about everything note­worthy in a giv­en film as an indic­a­tion of the dir­ect­ori­al sig­na­ture. Yes, the art is col­lab­or­at­ive, and yes, Orson Welles put cine­ma­to­graph­er Gregg Toland on the same title card as his on Citizen Kane, but unless we’d also read Bazin’s rhaps­od­ies on the deep focus in The Little Foxes, we wer­en’t neces­sar­ily identi­fy­ing a Toland style. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond was reportedly proud of the fact that no one film he shot looked the same as anoth­er, but that’s not to say that he did­n’t have a sig­na­ture, a style, a vision. 

It was My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™ who first poin­ted out to me what he con­sidered a clas­sic Zsigmond effect, in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There are sev­er­al shots in the scene a little under 45 minutes in, in the Mission Control Receiving Center, when Bob Balaban’s char­ac­ter blows every­body’s minds by reveal­ing that the sig­nals they’ve been get­ting from out­er space are coordin­ates. Zsigmond shoots the high-ceilinged, gray-walled, largely blue-lit room so that the back­grounds are always a little out of focus; in the shot where Balaban’s char­ac­ter is pick­ing up the readouts com­ing out of the print­er he’s the only act­or in per­fect focus. The white-haired act­or in the blue suit in front of him is also a little blurry, and a little blue light glints off his white hair. These manip­u­la­tions of focus and light­ing marked Zsigmond, to my mind, as a kind of stealth Impressionist. There was nev­er a skimp­ing on filling the frame with the visu­al inform­a­tion to get the point of the shot across, but there were also pock­ets of evoc­at­ive beauty in the frames; in this scene they off­set the work­aday real­ism of the spec­u­la­tions and the cal­cu­la­tions of the befuddles sci­ent­ist and kept the film’s oth­er foot where it always wants to be, in a realm of wonder. 

When MCPFRG™ hipped me to this, it was pretty early in our rela­tion­ship, late 1978 I guess, and we soon embarked on a several-year-long-project of get­ting high and see­ing lots of movies in Manhattan rep houses, and I determ­ined to pay more atten­tion to cine­ma­to­graphy. So when I saw McCabe & Mrs. Miller for the first time shortly there­after, Zsigmond’s impres­sion­ism, or Impressionism I guess, wal­loped me again, des­pite it being in an entirely dif­fer­ent register than that of Close Encounters. And it worked won­ders in the con­text of dir­ect­or Robert Altman’s gritty, cold, fron­ti­er pess­im­ism and fatal­ism as it did in that of Spielberg’s wish-upon-a-star vis­ion. It also works a treat in Altman’s The Long Goodbye, and in a lesser-known Altman that’s raggedy and brittle and does­n’t quite pull off its con­ceit, but which I love any­way because of when I saw it, who’s in it, and how it looks. That is, 1972’s Images, from which I took the top image and from which the next three still cap­tures are derived (the oth­er act­ors besides York and Harrison are Rene Auberjonois and Hugh Millais). 

Like Lee Garmes, like Gregg Toland, like John Alton, like Raoul Coutard, like his friend and fel­low émigré László Kovács, like Gordon Willis, Michael Chapman, Michael Ballhaus, and many oth­ers, Zsigmond’s way of shoot­ing (and expos­ing) film derived dir­ectly from a way of look­ing at the world, and pro­cessing what he saw, not from the pur­suit of a con­trived ideal. He was one of cinema’s great artists, for sure.