As a film student in Budapest Laszlo Kovacs risked arrest and execution to film the 1956 uprising against Soviet rule. He escaped to the US – where his footage became part of the recorded history of the 20th century and he became a leading cinematographer.

In the US he joined a second rebellion, that of the young generation of film-makers who forced Hollywood to reconsider its values. His cinematography brought a poetic realism to the antiestablishment classics Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970). His camera celebrated American characters and landscape with equal passion, drawing on the spirit of the western and that of the times in which he lived.

He worked with Altman and Scorsese, Rafelson and Bogdanovich, part of a counter-cultural movement now seen as a golden age. He seemed equally comfortable with subdued, intimate scenes and dazzling pyrotechnics, full of spectacle and colour, a range that became more apparent in later years on such blockbusters as Ghostbusters (1984), My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) and Miss Congeniality (2000).

Born in 1933, in the countryside outside Budapest, he first saw films in a village schoolroom that doubled as the cinema – he was allowed in free in return for distributing advertising leaflets. As a teenager in Budapest he would sometimes watch four films a day. In the early 1950s he enrolled in the city’s film school, where he met Vilmos Zsigmond, who would also become a leading Hollywood cinematographer. When the 1956 uprising broke out they borrowed equipment from the school, stuck it in shopping bag and headed out on to the streets.

“Vilmos Zsigmond and I walked all over Budapest and started shooting the scenes we came across,” he recalled. They followed the sound of gun-fire, taking their camera out of the bag to shoot surreptitiously.

“It was crazy. People were being killed. The city was being reduced to ruins. We shot for four or five days before the Russians finally crushed the revolution. We hid the film, some 30,000 feet, in three big potato sacks, and then we headed for the Austrian border.”

They arrived in the US in 1957, served as cameramen on medical and educational films and on a low-budget feature entitled The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964). Working for the producer, Roger Corman, they met many of the directors and actors who would reshape Hollywood in the 1970s. Kovacs was cinematographer on Targets (1968), a thriller now regarded as a minor classic, and this was the start of a long working relationship with the director Peter Bogdanovich.

Kovacs had already made several biker movies, including Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) with an obscure Corman regular called Jack Nicholson, when he was approached by Dennis Hopper to shoot Easy Rider. Initially sceptical, he was persuaded by the passion and vision shown by the famously manic actor.

Hopper had never directed a feature and has said he could not have done it without Kovacs. For his part Kovacs was familiar with the sub-genre but not the landscape in which they were to shoot, so the film became a journey of discovery for him. Kovacs shouted instructions to Hopper and his co-star Peter Fonda as his camera car accompanied the bikes, telling them to move back and forward in an attempt to create “a ballet on the highway”.

He had the actors back-lit by the Sun and sometimes the spectrum caught in the lens, leading to accusations from established cinematographers that he did not know what he was doing, but he insisted it was quite deliberate. “Each piece of light is a brush-stroke, giving different emotional values,” he said.

Easy Rider cost $340,000 and grossed about 100 times as much on initial release. It persuaded the ailing leading Hollywood studios to think again about big-budget epics and established economic practices, convincing them there was a lucrative market for counter-culture, rock music, drugs (on screen) and youthful rebellion.

Almost immediately Kovacs went to work on another iconic drama Five Easy Pieces, with Nicholson, who had had a supporting role in Easy Rider.

Although his films often embodied the spirit of his age, he was particularly proud of Paper Moon (1973), Bogdanovich’s gentle comedy-drama starring Ryan and Tatum O’Neal as con-artists during the Depression. Using monochrome film, Kovacs attempted to recreate the texture of an earlier age, taking advice from Orson Welles in the process.

He was cinematographer or director of photography on about 70 US feature films, including What’s up Doc? (1972), Shampoo (1975), Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977), Mask (1985), Legal Eagles (1986), Copycat (1995) and Two Weeks Notice (2002). He helped out his old friend Zsigmond on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), for which Zsigmond won an Oscar.

Perhaps because his most striking work was only fully appreciated retrospectively, Kovacs did not get a single Academy Award nomination, though he did receive a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Cinematographers.

He is survived by Audrey, his wife of 23 years, and two daughters.

Laszlo Kovacs, cinematographer, was born on May 14, 1933. He died in his sleep on July 22, 2007, aged 74