The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (460 page)

Her own films are not free from unresolved anger and a jaundiced view of humanity. She grew into directing out of a series of BBC documentaries. Her study of Van Gogh is as sensuous and as severe as the painter’s personality and—like all her films—made with awesome sincerity. At times, that led her into strident overemphasis:
The Girls
is almost a parody of feminist cinema. But
Loving Couples
and
Night Games
are trenchant, violent, and authentically Strindbergian visions of sexual hypocrisy. A sense of fun (often evident in her acting) shows itself in her view of the bulging concentration in Olympic weightlifters.

She also acted in
Hidden Agenda
(90, Ken Loach) and
The Witches
(90, Nicolas Roeg).

Zhang Yimou
, b. Shaanxi Province, China, 1951
1987:
Hong Gao Liang/Red Sorghum
. 1989:
Deihao Meizhoubao
. 1990:
Ju Dou
. 1992:
Da Hong Deng Long Gao Gao Gua/Raise the Red Lantern; Qui Ju Da Guan Si/The Story of Qiu Ju
. 1994:
Zuozhe/To Live
. 1995:
Yao a Yao Yao Dao Waipo Qiao/Shanghai Triad; Lumière et Compagnie
. 1997:
You Hua Hao Hao Shuo/Keep Cool
. 1999:
Yi Ge Dou Bu Neng Shao/Not One Less
. 2001:
Wo De Fun Qin Mu Qin/The Road Home
. 2002:
Xingfu Shignang/Happy Town; Ying Xiong/Hero
. 2004:
Shi Mian Mai Fu/Flying Daggers
. 2005:
Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
. 2006:
Curse of the Golden Flower
. 2009:
A Simple Noodle Story
. Zhang Yimou was trained in cinematography at the Beijing Film Academy, and he proved an outstanding cameraman in the 1980s:
Yellow Earth
(84, Chen Kaige) and
Lao Jing
(87, Wu Tianming). It is hard to think of a cameraman who has made the graduation to directing with such assurance. Indeed, in cinema at large, there are few directors whose next works are more eagerly anticipated. Above all, his four films show a progress that is very exciting.
Ju Dou
, for instance, has elements of James M. Cain and Jacobean tragedy, but in
Raise the Red Lantern
there was a new depth and compassion.

Zhang Yimou’s strengths are many: he has a command of intricate, quick narratives all the more surprising in that he sometimes dwells on shots or scenes—but complexities mount up very rapidly (as in the development of the brutal son in
Ju Dou);
he is as great a director of interiors as Ozu or Mizoguchi—the dye works in
Ju Dou
and the household in
Raise the Red Lantern
become superb stages for the melodrama; and he has Gong Li as his actress. It has been a wonder to see her grow from
Red Sorghum
into the powerplayer of
Raise the Red Lantern
and the nagging negotiator of
Qiu Ju
. She is an actress with the same range of sensuality, insight, and force as Sandrine Bonnaire.

Gong Li starred again in
Shanghai Triad
, the most ambitious and ravishing of Zhang Yimou’s films, and a fond nod to American gangster films. The late films are much less flamboyant—they deal with modern Chinese history, with problems in the education system, and even with a kind of nostalgia for calmer, pre-Mao days—and it is notable that they have won far less distribution in the West. It’s not just that film is new in China (and daunted by the examples of Hong Kong and Taiwan); it’s also that modern society is hardly yet of age. But America ought to remember the great role of film in any society finding itself, and trying to reconcile realities with heady dreams.

His most recent pictures have been disappointments, but his part in the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics drew wide acclaim.

Fred Zinnemann
(1907–97), b. Vienna
1942:
Kid Glove Killer; Eyes in the Night
. 1944:
The Seventh Cross
. 1946:
Little Mr. Jim; My Brother Talks to Horses
. 1948:
Act of Violence; The Search
. 1950:
The Men
. 1951:
Teresa; Benjy
(d). 1952:
High Noon
. 1953:
Member of the Wedding; From Here to Eternity
. 1955:
Oklahoma!
. 1957:
A Hatful of Rain
. 1959:
The Nun’s Story
. 1960:
The Sundowners
. 1964:
Behold a Pale Horse
. 1967:
A Man for All Seasons
. 1973:
The Day of the Jackal
. 1977:
Julia
. 1983:
Five Days One Summer
.

Trained first as a violinist and lawyer, Zinnemann studied at the University of Vienna and, in 1929, was one of the several collaborators on
Menschen am Sonntag
(Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer). He went to America and played a small part in
All Quiet On the Western Front
(30, Lewis Milestone). Having worked as an assistant to Berthold Viertel, Robert Flaherty, and Paul Strand, he went to Mexico and directed a documentary,
Redes
(34), with Strand. In 1937 he joined MGM to make shorts in the
Crime Doesn’t Pay
series. One of these,
That Mothers Might Live
(38), won an Oscar, and during the war he was promoted to full direction, initially on second features.

Julia
was sad proof of the grinding good taste that always inhibited Zinnemann. It settles for scenery, costumes, suspense, and the vague sisterly pact of Fonda and Redgrave. No wonder it pleased so many, for it made all its harsh subject smooth and digestible—terror was brought down to the level of discreet soap opera.

Zinnemann worked with the parsimony that he may have believed was appropriate to high principles and great talent. With those other middlebrows, George Stevens and William Wyler, he was reckoned a paragon of safe seriousness as the guts ran out of Hollywood. But it is a hapless, irrelevant fastidiousness that waits six years between Robert Bolt’s play for complacent thinkers and Frederick Forsythe’s thriller for readers as indifferent to politics as they are untouched by violence. And how is it that both films share the same glossy anonymity yet still tickle witless audiences?

It is not a pressing question, for Zinnemann always made films remotely. He had all the disposable qualities: diligence instead of imagination; more care than instinct; solemnity, but no wit. In the immediately postwar years he earned a reputation as a social realist with
Act of Violence, The Search
, and
The Men
. The first, I think, is the best film he ever made, the rest unexpected and shocking; but the latter two are mild-mannered and sentimental, intriguing only for the scope they give the young Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. Perhaps to redress the underground pretensions of Kramer and Foreman he stressed the minute-by-minute excitement of
High Noon
.

But then he plunged into major prestige literary or theatrical originals.
Member of the Wedding
’s subtlety was beyond him, just as the robustness of James Jones’s
From Here to Eternity
scared him off. After that, he took the exclamation mark away from
Oklahoma!
and drifted into mulch with
The Nun’s Story. Behold a Pale Horse
was a gravely silly parable and
A Man for All Seasons
showed that if you make a movie around a fine, intelligent stage performance you can emerge with a rather vague film. Zinnemann over the years has suffered several curtailed projects, including
The Old Man and the Sea, Hawaii
, and
Man’s Fate
.

The Day of the Jackal
is all the more depressing a work to see through; plot-heavy, without any of the honest character study that Zinnemann once knew how to manage, and with Frenchmen talking like zis and zat. No director could have made a flop out of
The Day of the Jackal
, but few could have taken its listless neglect of style so compliantly.
Act of Violence
is the one film that endures—a seemingly conventional piece of menace that uncovers depths of character, guilt, malice and smalltown life. A real movie, but a line Zinnemann did not pursue.

Vilmos Zsigmond
, b. Szeged, Hungary, 1930
If we ever lose touch with the romance and the exploratory nobility of the idea of “the man with a movie camera,” it may be because our lights have been turned out already. And if the story of that figure is ever properly told, then Vilmos Zsigmond has a vital place.

As young men, he and his friend László Kovács (1933–2007), escaped from Hungary together in 1956 with quantities of newsreel material they had shot on the streets of Budapest. They were able to sell this film to CBS and other sources and so they began crucially as documentary cameramen—their footage might not have been beautiful or polished, but it was a unique record of important events and actions.

They settled in the United States and it was their dream to become movie photographers (after doing commercials). So it was that “William” Zsigmond and Kovács got credits as camera operator on
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies
(64, Ray Dennis Steckler). This led Zsigmond to several crowded years in which he was director of photography on trashy exploitation pictures:
The Sadist
(63, James Landis);
Living Between Two Worlds
(64, Bobby Johnson);
The Nasty Rabbit
(64, Landis);
Psycho a Go-Go
(65, Al Adamson);
Rat Fink
(65, Landis);
The Road to Nashville
(67, Robert Patrick);
The Name of the Game Is Kill
(68, Gunnar Hellstrom), about a Hungarian (played by Jack Lord!) in the southwest desert who meets Susan Strasberg, snakes, drugs, and wild sex—and why not? There was a lot of this kind of moviemaking going on at the time, and anyone involved was learning a lot.

Zsigmond’s first respectable film was
The Picasso Summer
(69, Serge Bourguignon), but he was still doing
Satan’s Sadists
(70, Adamson) and
Futz!
(70, Tom O’Horgan). In the same years, Kovács edged ahead because of his work on
Targets, Easy Rider
, and
Five Easy Pieces
. But then, Zsigmond (as Vilmos) was hired—at Kovács’s recommendation—to do
McCabe & Mrs Miller
(71, Robert Altman). Kovács was a fine naturalistic photographer, but Zsigmond emerged now as a poet with his sense of winter in the northwest, of snow falling like opium, and of the visual equivalent of that numbness in which you could never quite hear what was being said. Was this at Altman’s request or was it Zsigmond’s doing? No one really can say, but Altman took flight on the shifting zoom lens he had been given.

Kovács was established, to be sure—he would do
Paper Moon, What’s Up, Doc?, Shampoo
, and
New York, New York
—but Zsigmond was a star:
The Hired Hand
(71, Peter Fonda);
Images
(72, Altman);
Deliverance
(72, John Boorman);
The Long Goodbye
(73, Altman)—one of the most beautiful Los Angeles movies ever shot;
Cinderella Liberty
(73, Mark Rydell);
The Sugarland Express
(74, Steven Spielberg);
Sweet Revenge
(76, Jerry Schatzberg);
Obsession
(76, Brian De Palma); and then
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(77, Spielberg), a supreme light show, where Kovács was a co-photographer but Zsigmond won the Oscar.

From that he went on to be Michael Cimino’s photographer—on
The Deer Hunter
(another nomination) and then on
Heaven’s Gate
(80). In both cases large shifts of locale and light, the sense of epic and neurotic in the material, are richly conveyed in the imagery. Above all, those two Cimino films now stand clear as a swansong to untouched or unmodified photography—we feel heaven and hell in the two films and it comes in the light itself, in the steel furnace, in Meryl Streep’s pale face, in Isabelle Huppert’s skin, and in the mountain glory of Heaven’s Gate.

But
Heaven’s Gate
was a tough film to survive. Zsigmond generally shot what he was told to shoot, but he must have picked up some blame for self-indulgence. And so his work became less interesting:
Winter Kills
(79, William Richert);
Flesh & Blood
(79, Jud Taylor);
The Rose
(79, Rydell);
Blow Out
(81, De Palma);
Jinxed!
(82, Don Siegel);
Table for Five
(83, Robert Lieberman);
No Small Affair
(84, Schatzberg);
The River
(84, Rydell);
The Witches of Eastwick
(87, George Miller);
Fat Man and Little Boy
(89, Roland Joffe);
The Two Jakes
(90, Jack Nicholson);
The Bonfire of the Vanities
(90, De Palma).

He photographed
Stalin
(92, Ivan Passer) for TV and then he did two Sharon Stone pictures—
Sliver
(93, Phillip Noyce) and
Intersection
(94, Rydell);
Maverick
(94, Richard Donner);
The Crossing Guard
(95, Sean Penn)—a return to atmosphere;
Assassins
(95, Donner);
The Ghost and the Darkness
(96, Stephen Hopkins);
Playing by Heart
(98, Willard Carroll); and
The Argument
(99), a short film by Donald Cammell.

In 2000, he shot a film about Sven Nykvist—
Light Keeps Me Company
(Carl-Gustav Nykvist). He then went back to Hungary to shoot
Bánk Bán
(01, Csaba Káel). In America, he did
The Body
(01 Jonas McCord);
The Mists of Avalon
(01, Uli Edel);
Life as a House
(01, Irwin Winkler);
Jersey Girl
(04, Kevin Smith);
Melinda and Melinda
(04, Woody Allen); and then, at last yielding to digital, with horrible results, on
The Black Dahlia
(06, De Palma);
Cassandra’s Dream
(07, Allen).