Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC
The Black Dahlia
 Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC was born and raised in Szeged, Hungary. His first job was in a factory where he organized a photo club for workers. That led to an opportunity for him to enroll at the Academy for Theater and Film Art in Budapest. Several months after he graduated, Zsigmond and fellow classmate Laszlo Kovacs, ASC documented the brutal suppression of revolt against the communist regime in October 1956. They arrived in the United States 50 years ago as political refugees with a dream in their hearts. Zsigmond worked at odd jobs and shot ultra-low budget films until he broke into mainstream filmmaking in 1971with McCabe and Mrs. Miller. The rest is history. He earned an Oscar for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and other nominationsfor The Deer Hunter (1978)and The River (1984). Zsigmond also won Emmy and ASC Outstanding Achievement Awards for the telefilm Stalin (1992), an ASC nomination for The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), and an Emmy nomination for The Mists of Avalon (2001). He has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from Camerimage and ASC. His body of work includes Deliverance, The Sugarland Express, The Rose, The Witches of Eastwick, The Two Jakes, Maverick, The Long Goodbye and Cinderella Liberty.
“Film noir is an abstract form of art that uses light and shadows to set the moods for stories. Before there was film, you saw that look in paintings, especially from the Caravaggio era. I also saw that look in black-and-white photography books.”
Inspired by the most notorious unsolved murder in California history, two ambitious Los Angeles cops, Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett), investigate the circumstances surrounding the mutilated body of a young starlet, dubbed “The Black Dahlia.” Her brutal murder becomes an obsession for the men, and their lives begin to unravel as the search for answers leads them into the darkest recesses of the city’s hidden corruption.
[To
Awards Home Page] |
