Bert Spielvogel


Bert Spielvogel was an American film cinematographer and director well known for his work on documentary, educational, and industrial and sponsored films. He also worked on a number of fictional films.

Career

Speilvogel's early experience covers work with famous documentarian Robert Flaherty and the original Cinerama group. Along with Richard Leacock, he was a cinematographer on Flaherty's Louisiana Story, which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing Motion Picture Story in 1949 and has been selected for the National Film Registry. He was an instructor in Cinematography at the American University in Washington, DC. He also served as the newsreel March of Time's photographic chief.
Spielvogel was associated with several commercial and industrial film companies, including MPO Productions, National Film Studios in Washington, DC, Norwood Studios, Potomac Films, On Film, Inc, which he joined in 1961, and Pelican Films.
In New York, he was part of the dynamic art scene around 98 Greene Street, where, according to one scholar, he "supervised the film program and tended the machinery, produced Ads, a chain of television commercials documenting the history of this genre from its beginning-a history that Spielvogel in his days as a pioneering maker of TV commercials had significantly shaped."
He also shot commercial and fictional feature films. Dirtymouth, a biopic of Lenny Bruce, was described by the New York Times reviewer in 1971 as a "very bad movie."

Filmography