ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the experiments and innovations of avant-garde women in cinematography and photography. In these fields they introduced the female point of view and sensitivity into worlds that had been exclusively ruled by men. The most exemplary cases are those of the photographer Lucia Schulz, better known as Lucia Moholy-Nagy, and the film maker Hortense Ribbentrop-Leudesdorff. The experiments carried out on the photographic film by Schulz, together with her husband László Moholy-Nagy, marked a turning point in the history of cinema and are the bases of modern cinematography. Hortense Ribbentrop-Leudesdorff was also an innovator; her collaborations with Julius Pinschewer and Erwin Piscator show the strength of a female gaze in a world that was still purely male. Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis) can be considered the first significant cinematographic production that reflects on the new concept of metropolis and the female figures that populate it. These activities are an example of the way in which two women behind the camera laid the foundations of contemporary cinematography and photography, even if during their lifetime they were not given the merits they deserved, and, in fact, often had their partners take credit for their creations.
