Hollywood studios have good reason to be grateful to repressive European governments for having provided them with refugee film-makers who made hugely significant contributions to the American film industry. The cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who has died aged 85, arrived in the US in 1956, having fled his native Hungary as Russian tanks put down the Hungarian revolution. Over the next few decades, he became associated with many leading American directors, notably Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Michael Cimino and Woody Allen.
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). Using the wide-screen Panavision image (before screens got narrower to accommodate home video), Zsigmond steeped this anti-western in dark, wet, cold tones. It was the kind of desaturated cinematography for which he became renowned.
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