Vilmos Zsigmond ASC (Hungarian: [ˈvilmoʃ ˈʒiɡmond]; June 16, 1930 – January 1, 2016) was a Hungarian-American cinematographer.

[2][3][4][5][6] Over his career he became associated with many leading American directors, such as Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Michael Cimino and Woody Allen.

[8][15][16] As a result he won the respect of local commissars and was allowed to study cinema at the Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest and received an MA in cinematography.

[7][8][15] In 1958 Zsigmond and Kovács arrived in the United States as political refugees and sold the footage to CBS for a network documentary on the revolution narrated by Walter Cronkite.

[8][10] Some of the major films he shot in the 1970s include John Boorman's Deliverance, Altman's The Long Goodbye and Brian De Palma's Obsession, as well as Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the latter of which won him the Academy Award for Best Cinematography at the 50th Academy Awards.

[9][16] In 1978, Zsigmond worked on Michael Cimino's drama The Deer Hunter, starring Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken.

[9][26] In 2011 Zsigmond co-founded the Global Cinematography Institute in Los Angeles, along with fellow cinematographer Yuri Neyman.

[27] He was a longtime user and endorser of Tiffen filters, and is associated with the technique known as flashing or pre-fogging, which involves carefully exposing the film negative to a small, controlled amount of light in order to create a muted color palette.