Briefs for January 4, 2016

Vilmos Zsigmond died over the holiday weekend at the age of 85. If you haven't heard of him, that's because he was one of the behind the scenes people, working as a cinematographer. Zsigmond, who was born in Hungary and fled after the failed 1956 uprising was put down and the Soviets invaded, won an Oscar for his work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Among his other work is Deliverance, Cinderella Liberty, and The Sugarland Express.

I don't know how many of you have seen the movie The Field; it's one that I've only seen show up in the TV listings but never actually got around to watching. The movie is absed on a play which is a dramatization of a real murder from late 1950s Ireland. Richard Harris received an Oscar nomination (he lost to Jeremy Irons in Reversal of Fortune) for his portray of the older Irish farmer. However, the play and later movie apparently change a whole bunch of events, as you can hear in this documentary from Ireland's public broadcaster RTÉ. If you want to download the documentary directly, you can do that at this link; it's a ~37MB MP3 and a 40-minute program.