Left to my own devices, I probably could: reflections on inclusive pedagogy and gender equity during Melbourne’s pandemic lockdown

As educators who teach film in a University that advocates for regional visibility, inclusive pedagogy, and online learning, we would ideally present our student works as case studies in equity and diversity. The reality of what we face in classrooms is, sadly, quite different. In filmmaking, women stand back and let men take over. In their analytic essays, the work of male scholars and film directors is routinely cited. In a period of feminist advocacy, students appear alarmingly unaware that film canons have been overthrown and rewritten. Although we try to redress this, our current experience of distance teaching during the COVID-19 lockdown is unexpectedly revealing new pathways to feminist pedagogy and progress. Returned to the home as a site of creative play, women are forced to make movies with what they have at hand. The mobile phone or prosumer camera becomes a device to be technologically exploited and used in film production. The critical essay becomes a dialogue with communities that experience distress and isolation: Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander peoples, women, adolescents, and immigrants. We argue that 2021 is consequentially a year in which the home is not necessarily a site of entrapment. Developing Heide Schlüpmann’s 2013 article, “An Alliance between History and Theory”, we argue that the home provides not only the historic and theoretic foundation for cinema’s sense of perceptual play, but that it is also a contemporary and productive site for feminist filmmaking.