Tonal

As a child in Hungary, László Kovács would go to the movies with his mother. “I didn’t know much about the world,” he remembers. When the film began, “I took a deep breath, always through this rectangular frame, I will see the world.” Such impressions inspired Kovács to attend the Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest from 1952 to 1956, where he began creating his own images of the world.  When the Hungarian Revolution erupted in ‘56, he and fellow student Vilmos Zsigmond didn’t think twice: they used one of the school’s Arriflex cameras—a heavy device that shot black and white—and started shooting, secretly. “The camera was considered a weapon by the Russians,” recalls Kovács, “They shot you on the spot.”

They survived, and went on to smuggle the footage out of the country in late 1956. Through this experience, according to No Subtitles Necessary: László & Vilmos, airing this month as part of Independent Lens, both men honed a sense that their work was serious. Knowing, as Zsigmond says, that “when you leave the country, you can’t come back,” they made their way, with film in hand, to the States. (In fact, they did go home, years later, when Kovács insisted on reconnecting with his girlfriend Audrey, whom he married.) Though their hard-won, frequently harrowing footage was no longer considered newsworthy when the revolution was quashed by the Soviets in early 1957, it did air in a CBS documentary, narrated by Walter Cronkite, in 1961.

In the meantime, Kovács and Zsigmond headed to California, where they made a series of low budget features (including Ray Dennis Steckler’s The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies). Taking turns on lighting and cinematography, they developed aesthetic sensibilities that were deeply informed by a progressive politics and sober morality. Together and separately, they helped to develop what became known as the “New Hollywood” of the 1970s. Even as each became famous for his work on seminal films—Kovács on Five Easy Pieces, Paper Moon, and Shampoo, Zsigmond on McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (for which he won an Academy Award), and The Deer Hunter—they remained connected throughout their lives and careers. Indeed, as Richard Donner puts it, they were revered as “two brothers, with strange last names and different last names.” 

Bob Rafelson recalls that during their early careers, when they were known as “Willie” and “Leslie,” they were “illegitimate, they were living on the outside of the studio system.” Young filmmakers like Peter Fonda, Steven Spielberg, and Robert Altman sought out their “adventurous” approach to even mundane or frankly ludicrous studio projects (Peter Bogdanovich remembers being urged to hire Kovács for his first feature Targets, by a friend who extolled his work on The Girl in the Invisible Bikini, which featured Boris Karloff and and up-and-coming Nancy Sinatra). Kovács came into his own during Easy Rider. Ellen Kuras says the picture “was able to give a sense of freedom, of being on the road, of seeing America for the first time. I was able to see America like he was experiencing America.”

When Kuras submits that “These two Hungarian guys… changed the face of American cinema,” her insight and enthusiasm are echoed by every interview subject here, including actors who benefitted from their attention to detail and generosity on the set. As Tatum O’Neal recalls, Kovács helped to make her experience on Paper Moon at least a little less daunting. (Kovács died in 2007, during the film’s production, and it is dedicated to him.) Despite and because of such intimate experiences with their coworkers, Kovács and Zsigmond became legendary, both for their art and their back stories: Rafelson says the elaborate contraptions Kovács devised for his cameras were “exceedingly inventive and it all stems from a life on the run in Hungary.” Sharon Stone, of all people, who worked with Kovács on Sliver), panegyrizes, “He learned how to light in a war zone. The light has quality to it that’s not just visual, it’s tonal. If you’re really listening to it, [light] has rhythm, it has movement.” And William Richert makes his own poetic evaluation of Zsigmond’s brilliance: “Vilmos almost seems to smell light.” 

While such pronouncements are surely dramatic, the most compelling stories in No Subtitles Necessary—which takes a decidedly episodic form, hopping from one film and one career moment to another—are those focused on actual film experiences. John Boorman remembers the dangers of shooting on the river for Deliverance (a point underlined when Jon Voigt says, “When you get four young guys and one of them is Burt Reynolds, who was a stunt man, you’re tempted to do your own stunts”), and Zsigmond remembers Close Encounters as “the biggest lighting challenge of my life.” Throughout his career, Zsigmond remained dedicated to his art and humble concerning his personal impact (in his Oscar acceptance speech, included here, he says, “Thank you first to this country, the Americans who gave me a second life”). As remarkable as his work has been, he insists that he seeks another sort of effect. “In a good movie,” Zsigmond says, “the cinematography has to blend in with the storytelling. It can’t be too good.”