Maryse Alberti


Maryse Alberti is a French cinematographer who mainly works in the United States on independent fiction films and vérité, observational documentaries. Alberti has won awards from the Sundance Film Festival and the Spirit Awards. She was the first contemporary female cinematographer featured on the cover of American Cinematographer for her work on the Todd Haynes-directed Velvet Goldmine. She is also known for her work on Darren Aronofsky's 2008 wrestling drama, The Wrestler, and the 2018 HBO film My Dinner with Hervé.

Early life

Maryse Alberti was born in Langon, France. At the age of 19 in 1973, Alberti travelled to New York City planning to see Jimi Hendrix in concert, but only discovered of his death after her arrival. Instead of returning to France, she hitchhiked around the US for three years before she settled in New York City. There, she began a job as an au pair before turning to film.
She did not attend film school.

Career

Alberti first landed in the film industry as a still photographer for porn films. In 1982, after having worked on enough film sets and getting to know people within the industry, she persuaded the filmmakers of the small punk film-noir film Vortex to let her be an assistant to the cinematographer. At the time, she had known nothing about film-making and was trained by the film's cinematographer, Steven Fierberg.
Alberti began her cinematography career working for the film company, Apparatus, run by short-film director Christine Vachon. The first full-length documentary she shot was Stephanie Black's H-2 Worker. She won her first Sundance Film Festival award as a cinematographer for this film. She secured her career after being hired for Todd Haynes' controversial pseudo-documentary feature film Poison.
She is most well-known for shooting both feature films and small 16mm documentaries- her favourite camera being an Aaton 16 mm camera. She has said that her favourite genre of film is documentary because she finds there is "always an adventure a lesson" with this medium and she enjoys learning how to use simple tools and work with small groups of people.
Alberti's first big-budget film was Haynes' Velvet Goldmine with a budget of $8 million. This was also the first time she used a camera operator.
In June 2006, Alberti travelled to Germany to film portions of the FIFA World Cup for scenes to be shown in Michael Apted's soccer documentary The Power of the Game.
Other work includes Darren Aronofsky's 2008 wrestling drama, The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke. Aronofsky hired Alberti as the cinematographer due to her documentary background. Prior to working on this film, Alberti had no knowledge or experience with wrestling, so she would study the sport by attending wrestling matches with members of the crew every Saturday night for a period of time. She revealed that viewing the sport in person was helpful to see the world of wrestling. The director and she decided on a "naturalist look"; her aim was to "make work for the drama of the film and keep it as natural as possible" in order to let the viewer feel like they were in a "real place". Important film elements, styles, and techniques were decided between Alberti and the director including an aspect ratio of 2.4:1 in order to capture the wrestling ring, fans, and the arena which they decided were very valuable to the sport. Alberti also used a handheld camera for the action scenes and shot in 16mm film to, as she states in an interview with MovieMaker, " a slightly grainy, edgier look". She used an Arriflex 416 camera and Kodak Vision3 500T colour negative film 7219.
In 2013, Alberti's photography series called The Pool Series was featured in the Show Room gallery in Brooklyn, New York.

Practice

Alberti has stated that she could not see what she was photographing and could "only anticipate what the next fragment of time might look like" and thus aimed to create an "artistic anticipation".
Alberti has said that being a woman in a male-dominated field of work has not hindered her career and success. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, she mentions that in the beginning of her career, crew members would tease her for being a petite woman working a physically demanding job. In response, she would reply with "The little lady doesn't carry the big lights. She points and the big guys carry the lights".

Awards and nominations