“Left to my own devices, I probably could”

Abstract

Developing Heide Schlüpmann’s 2013 article, “An Alliance Between History and Theory”, we argue that the home provides the historic and theoretic foundation for cinema’s sense of perceptual play, and that it is also a contemporary and productive site for feminist filmmaking. Using our reflections as educators who experienced distance teaching during the Covid-19 lockdown in Melbourne, we explore how working from and within the home unexpectedly revealed new pathways to feminist pedagogy and progress. We reflect on how the home became a site of creative play, where women were forced to make movies with what they had at hand. The mobile phone or prosumer camera became, in this context, a device to be technologically exploited and used in film production. Linking this to wider developments in smartphone use in filmmaking today, we argue that 2020 was a year in which the home was not necessarily a site of entrapment.