Social Turbulence

Spike Lee is point out a serious matter in the States. A day lasting Brooklyn story is the tip of the iceberg.

Tribute RICHARD WIDMARK (December 26, 1914-March 24, 2008 ) by Volker Schlondorff-1987.

Laszlo Kovacs, a Hungarian cinematographer who fell in love with the American landscape on a cross-country bus ride and then used light, shadow and imagination to give visual shape to seminal films like ?Easy Rider,? died on Sunday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 74.



Adrees Latif/Reuters, 2002



Laszlo Kovacs

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Columbia Pictures



In films like ?Easy Rider? (1969), Laszlo Kovacs blended a love of landscape with an innovative filming style.



His death was announced by the International Cinematographers Guild. James Chressanthis, a cinematographer who is preparing a documentary on Mr. Kovacs and his friend and fellow cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, said that the cause was not known but that Mr. Kovacs had earlier had cancer.



Mr. Kovacs came along in the 1960s when the old studio system was sputtering and a new independent cinema was rising. Filmmakers emerged from film schools and work on B movies to challenge traditional themes and techniques and create what has been called ?the new Hollywood,? or ?the American new wave.?



Production moved from the studios to the streets, and the new breed used small crews, lightweight equipment and innovative means of coping with low budgets. Improvisation was both artistic goal and hard necessity. In ?Easy Rider? (1969), Mr. Kovacs used a 1968 Chevrolet convertible as his camera car, making the platform for his camera from a piece of plywood on the trunk held in place by a sandbag.



In that movie, he wanted to portray something hopeful after the fiery demise of the character played by Peter Fonda. A rising helicopter delivered a panoramic view of the horizon, but only after Mr. Kovacs balanced a camera on one skid and counterweights on the other to keep the helicopter from tipping over.



In ?Five Easy Pieces? (1970), Mr. Kovacs memorably matched the color of Susan Anspach?s blue eyes and the sky. In another scene, he shot Ms. Anspach and then let his camera drift elsewhere; she scurried behind the camera and he arrived back at her face, giving the illusion that the shot had gone all the way around the room.



His tricks included using flashing lights and other techniques to create the impression of psychedelic hallucinations. His goal was to let the environment make statements about the characters. He intended for the foggy islands of the Pacific Northwest to explain the tight little family in ?Five Easy Pieces.?



Most of his major works are clustered at the start of the 1970s, including ?That Cold Day in the Park? (1969), Robert Altman?s third feature as a director, and ?The King of Marvin Gardens? (1972), which, like ?Five Easy Pieces,? was directed by Bob Rafelson. He did six pictures with the director Peter Bogdanovich, including ?Targets? (1968), ?What?s Up, Doc?? (1972) and ?Paper Moon? (1973).



His range grew wider, with credits including Martin Scorsese?s movies ?New York, New York? (1977) and ?The Last Waltz? (1978) and Hal Ashby?s ?Shampoo? (1975). Other movies included ?Ghost Busters? (1984) and ?My Best Friend?s Wedding? (1997).



Mr. Kovacs was born on May 14, 1933, in Cece, a farming village about 60 miles west of Budapest. During the Nazi occupation, he distributed flyers for the propaganda movies shown each week in a school auditorium. His pay was a free seat, and he was fascinated by the flickering images.



In 1945, he was accepted into the Academy of Drama and Film Art in Budapest, where students watched Western films surreptitiously. He was swept off his feet by ?Citizen Kane,? saying it ?changed my visual vocabulary.?



In the uprising against the Communist regime in 1956, he and Mr. Zsigmond shot 30,000 feet of film at great risk to themselves. They escaped with the film, and some of it eventually became part of a documentary a few years later.



They both bounced among odd jobs. Around 1957, Mr. Kovacs, who had arrived in the United States speaking no English, moved from New Jersey to Seattle, taking the memorable bus ride that found echoes later in ?Easy Rider.? In 1959, he took another bus to Los Angeles, where he reunited with Mr. Zsigmond.



Mr. Kovacs did movies like ?The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill? (1966), often working with the B movie producer Roger Corman. After he shot eight biker movies in one year, Dennis Hopper asked him to do another. Mr. Kovacs?s reluctance to repeat himself vanished after Mr. Hopper acted out the script. ?Easy Rider,? with a budget of $340,000, was a sensation at Cannes and made $60 million.



Mr. Kovacs is survived by his wife, Audrey, and his daughters Julianna and Nadia.



He prided himself on spontaneity. He and the other crew members had no preconceived idea where they would shoot the classic scene in ?Five Easy Pieces? in which Jack Nicholson orders a chicken salad sandwich without the chicken salad just to get the toast he wants.



?Approaching the freeway, we saw a little rise, and there was the cafe,? he said in an interview with American Cinematographer magazine in 2005. ?I think we shot that scene in two hours, and then we moved on.?

The 1992 film, American Me, alludes to the fact that the lead character, Santana (played by Edward James Olmos), was conceived when his mother was raped by sailors during the Zoot Suit Riots.

Fireworks, an underground film by Kenneth Anger, depicts a dream inspired by the zoot suit riots, as reported by the author as an audio commentary to the 2007 DVD release.

Feminist politics at the turn of the twentieth century took many forms, including civil disobedience that was revisited in the 1960s by the civil rights movement. One of the most powerful forms of feminist protest came from the pen of Edith Wharton, whose novels dramatized the shallowness of money-driven American society in the Gilded Age, which she well knew as the spouse of a banker, whom she later divorced; rather than participating in the feminist movement, however, she spent much of the later years of her life in Europe.