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

98.5, as producer with Holly SolomonFresh Kill, as cinematographer, a 13-minute part of 98.5, which records the destruction of Gordon Matta-Clark's truck and shown at Documenta 5Clockshower Elvis on Tour, as camera operatorDirtymouth The Tailor, for USIAThe Filmmaker, photographed by, about filmmaker Tom Palazzolo, for USIAThe Violent Universe, additional photography for BBCStrangeness minus Three, for BBC series HorizonYear of Birth, presented by the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness in association with Brown UniversityQualities of Aluminum series, for sponsor Alcoa, which won the award for best series and best black and white cinematography in the 1961 American TV Commercials FestivalDead to the World, as cinematographer, based on the novel State Department MurdersMinuteman-Missile and Mission, sponsored by Thiokol Chemical, narrated by Alistair Cooke, with location sequences filmed in Thiokol's Utah Division and at Edwards Air Force base in CaliforniaThe New Girl Last Clear Chance, photographed by, produced for the Union Pacific Railroad about the dangers of unprotected railroad crossingsPlatform, an interview with Frank Lloyd Wright