Vilmos Zsigmond defined his own style as ‘poetic realism’. He strove for a natural representation of reality, yet poetry was always present in his images. He regarded light and composition as his most essential tools, while technology and camera quality were, in his view, of only secondary importance.
Zsigmond was a true scholar of light. He studied the treatment of light in the work of painters from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and was particularly influenced by Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Georges de La Tour. In his films, he frequently employed diffused light to achieve a natural effect. In his compositions, light invariably comes from a place where a natural light source exists – or could plausibly exist. He often reveals these sources within the frame itself (table lamps, floor lamps, windows, and so forth). He preferred shooting early in the morning, when the light streaming through windows could be blended with a small number of interior lamps. He disliked relying on a single light source, as this would limit his ability to create the most advantageous combination of lights for illuminating the actors.
Vilmos Zsigmond maintained that, unlike in documentary film, light in fiction cinema is indispensable not only because of the story and the actors, but also because of its power to create atmosphere. There is no film or digital technology capable of perceiving contour lines in complete darkness – only the human eye can do that. He often used light to produce non-realist effects and to evoke specific emotions in the viewer, since cinema is capable of creating a different, alternative reality. Audiences, in turn, have become accustomed to film language and recognise this reality. Zsigmond frequently worked with impressionistic techniques: in his films, for example, the moon is almost never as it appears in nature, but much brighter and bluer. Morning light, too, is far stronger and more shimmering than real morning light. These impressionistic exaggerations are essential for generating the intense emotional response he sought to elicit in the viewer.
Zsigmond always regarded close collaboration and a strong personal rapport with directors as essential to his work. He consistently sought to create a visual world that best served the story, while at the same time adapting with humility to the director’s artistic vision. He worked repeatedly with Robert Altman, Michael Cimino, Brian De Palma, and Woody Allen, although his collaboration with Franco Zeffirelli ultimately proved unsuccessful.
Through his work with major directors, he gradually acquired new visual means of expression. With Robert Altman, he mastered the use of the zoom lens. (In Hungary, zoom lenses were not used at that time, as they effectively did not yet exist.) Zooming could be combined particularly effectively with tracking movement, helping to achieve a perfect balance between approaching and withdrawing. It was in his collaboration with Brian De Palma that he began to move the camera through a full 360 degrees.
A fundamental stylistic trait of Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography was that he lit the actors rather than the background. He allowed actors considerable freedom of movement, avoiding tightly pre-lit positions, so that they could move freely within their performance space.
Zsigmond was the first to introduce the flashing technique in the United States – the pre-exposure of the negative, similar to the way photographic film receives a slight exposure before use. This process renders the image grainier, desaturates the colours, and makes shadowed scenes set in darkness more legible. The technique became one of the principal tools of his poetic realism.
As the cinematographer of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, directed by Robert Altman, Zsigmond earned major professional recognition through his revolutionary use of the flashing technique. This classical western, photographed with extraordinary sensitivity, consists almost entirely of shots that possess the quality of paintings. The interiors are characterised by the visual idiom of Netherlandish masters, while the exterior scenes reveal the influence of Gyula Benczúr [Hungarian nineteenth-century historical painter]. The landscape – springtime trees and fresh greens – forms a homogeneous unity with the pastel-coloured buildings and the worn costumes.
The film was made on a low budget, yet its execution is remarkably refined, with harmoniously planned and composed scenes. Zsigmond fully respected the conventions of the genre: every shot in McCabe & Mrs. Miller is unmistakably western in character. The American landscape is rendered with strong specificity, and the surrounding nature is filmed in constant interaction with the human figures inhabiting it. In lighting, he paid meticulous attention to detail, giving aesthetic emphasis to off-white collars, aprons, bed linen, and jugs. The colour palette is reduced to three or four dominant tones: the fresh, slightly muted spring green of the trees; the faded blue of trousers, shirts, and sky; the pastel hues of wooden and stone buildings; and the dense off-white of certain garments, collars, and everyday objects. Every frame of the film could be hung on a wall like a painting, reminiscent of works by Johannes Vermeer or John Singer Sargent. Zsigmond created a Wild West that is at once grimy and painterly in its beauty.
Scarecrow is a 1973 road movie by Jerry Schatzberg, marked by a distinctly documentary atmosphere. The film creates such a natural effect that it feels as though the camera were not present at all. Zsigmond used no artificial lighting for exterior scenes, and worked with minimal, simple lighting indoors. The pre-exposure of the film stock – flashing – made it possible to shoot with very little light. This restraint is precisely the film’s strength: the technology itself is almost invisible. A defining characteristic of Vilmos Zsigmond’s realism is that we do not perceive the technical apparatus behind the shots at all.
Scarecrow is a genuine independent film, akin to a home movie. There are many de-composed shots: characters frequently drift out of the frame, walk off, then return. The crew was small, and the method of filming recalls documentary practice, in which everyone performed multiple tasks and dialogue was often improvised. Key scenes – such as Gene Hackman’s striptease or Al Pacino’s breakdown – were filmed only once. The acting is astonishingly natural: Pacino and Hackman do not so much perform as exist within the milieu of America’s seedy bars and marginal spaces, populated by the down-and-out and those balancing on the edge of society. Among countless small moments and gestures, Zsigmond invariably captured the most expressive ones. For him, the depiction of milieu was at least as important as the unfolding of the narrative itself.
Zsigmond regarded the cinematography of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for which he ultimately received the Academy Award, as one of the most challenging tasks of his life. Steven Spielberg’s original concept was to give the film a documentary-like quality. Zsigmond, however, convinced him that a far greater impact could be achieved if the spacecraft were transformed into intensely coloured, powerful sources of light.
“We decided to use a great deal of light for the spaceships, to signal that the extraterrestrials’ level of technological development far surpassed our own. But this required an enormous number of lamps, for which there was no provision in the budget. In fact, I would have needed five times as many lighting units as were available. Naturally, the producers were not pleased, as this significantly increased the budget.”
In the end, Zsigmond found a solution to the famous arrival scene of the UFOs almost at the last moment, on location. He first scattered light onto enormous mirrored surfaces; when this still failed to produce the desired effect, he shattered the mirrors. The fragmented mirrors multiplied the intensity of the light projected onto them. This is how the simultaneously terrifying and wondrous extraterrestrial atmosphere of the “close encounter of the third kind” was ultimately created.
Vilmos Zsigmond considered The Deer Hunter his dearest work. “A perfect film – the only one I ever made,” he once remarked. Here, too, his outstanding ability to render nature with sensitivity becomes evident, whenever the opportunity arises. Although The Deer Hunter was shot in spring, the narrative required an autumnal, overcast mood, and the colours were therefore deliberately over-saturated. The three principal locations are all highly distinctive. In the cold industrial city filled with factories, cars, and bars, dark blue hues dominate, accompanied by smoke and neon lights. Rising above the city, the clear blue-green mountain landscape functions as the film’s point of calm. Finally, there is Vietnam, where the vivid green of nature is constantly interwoven with images of blood, fire, and explosions.
The lighting of the exterior scenes is naturalistic throughout. One important night scene of the Vietnam episode was shot on a river. Most of the power generators failed, so the lens aperture was opened as wide as possible. The realism of the scene lies in the heavy presence of shadows on the faces: we see almost exactly as much as one could realistically perceive in such a situation.
[2017]