Maryse Alberti Films | Maryse Alberti Filmography | Maryse Alberti Biography | Maryse Alberti Career | Maryse Alberti Awards

Maryse Alberti is a rarity in today?s flourishing, and increasingly ego-centered, independent film market. Though still one of the few women cinematographers in the United States, she is content to bring her vast technical expertise to a project and allow it to be tempered both by her intuition and the director?s own vision. What results is a body of work that is both impressive in it?s unconventional variety, and seductive in it?s distinctive, if sometimes almost invisible, Alberti stamp.

Alberti was raised on her grandmother?s farm in France, and first came to the United States at the age of 19. She had long dreamt of seeing Jimi Hendrix in concert (she?s still an avid rock fan), but soon discovered he was already dead. She worked as an au pair for a time, hitchhiked across the United States, and then started edging her way into the business as a still photographer for the New York Rocker and on porn films. ?I was broke,? she told Linda Lee in the New York Times (24 January 1999), ?and I said, ?Why not?? I loved being on the movie set.? (Next year she hopes to mount a tableau exhibition in New York of some of the porn, rock, and travel photographs she?s shot over the years).

This ease with which Alberti inhabits a set, coupled with a working expertise in the use of lights, gels, lenses, mirrors, and cameras themselves, has become an instilling trademark. In Paris Is Burning, a groundbreaking documentary of African-American male ?divas? in Harlem dressing in drag and staging an extravagant, all-night pageant, Alberti and her team (which included co-cinematographer Paul Gibson) are ever in the midst of the two-snaps-up action, swirling around like so much fluttering silk. And as director Todd Haynes, with whom Alberti did Poison and Velvet Goldmine, has noted, ?she creates an atmosphere on the set among her crew and particularly among actors that?s extremely trusting. They feel a kind of security with her that they might not feel in an all-male, macho kind of environment.? (American Cinematographer, November, 1998).

Not that Alberti can?t be stubborn too, according to some of her colleagues, but she?s never been afraid to push and learn, and listen to input from all sides. On making her first film, Vortex, a low-budget, punk film-noir shot cheaply on 16-millimeter, Alberti recalled to Lee that ?Steven Fierberg (the cinematographer) believed I knew what I was doing until the first day of shooting. But he was real nice, and I learned a lot.?

Alberti says her preparation for any project, big or small, now involves working like an architect, discussing the vision, imagining, drawing, and then matching the more ethereal concepts to the ?big machine? of cameras, tools and crew. Alberti?s two recent small-budget successes?Happiness and Velvet Goldmine?are as different as Des Moines and Times Square, but each attests to a clarity-of, adherence-to, and a fighting-for the director?s vision before any filming actually begins.

In Velvet, for example, a glittery ?rock Citizen Kane? focusing on the rise (and fall) of glam-rock stars, director Haynes was adamant about employing the dated camera vernacular of the 1970s?lots of zooming, panning, and swishing through space in an effort to isolate and caress certain scenes. ?This was the first movie I?ve done where I used so many colored gels,? Alberti told American Cinematographer. But when asked why she chose certain shades, pale greens and blues with edges of lavender to symbolize the end of an era, she readily admits there?s little method to the madness. ?They just felt right,? she says. ?(You) learn your technique, but don?t let it be the driving force. Instead, trust your intuition and instincts.? Happiness was an opposing experience, using a more subdued camera?and Alberti?s keen instincts?to tell a moving story about pedophilia. When shooting a scene where the father is confronted by his son about his sexual abuse, for example, Alberti and director Todd Solondz noticed that the child actor began to cry off-camera. They decided to immediately re-shoot the son?s scene, and what results is some raw emotion that is brilliantly captured.

Despite her success with dramas, Alberti claims the documentary is still her first love. ?I like to go back and forth actually,? she told this writer, ?but the documentary is important for my soul.? Inspirations, a feature-length documentary look at the creative process she filmed for director Michael Apted (with whom she also did Incident at Oglala and Moving the Mountain) and showcasing celebrity artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Alberti-favorite David Bowie, received rave reviews for her top-notch camerawork. ?There is a lot of pressure on feature films because there?s so much money involved,? she told Lee. ?A documentary, at this point in my life, I just go in with just two people, my little camera on my shoulder, and I just enter the world [she uses her own Aaton 16-millimeter]. There is no take two.??JEROME SZYMCZAK