understand the irony of quoting Freud here, of all people, but I’m reminded of a line from : “There was someone in darker times who thought the same as you.” At the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin last summer, curators and scholars Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg mounted the expansive multimedia exhibit —a series focused on non-fiction filmmaking by women between the ’70s and ’90s—a selection of which travelled to Toronto’s TIFF Cinematheque this winter. Global in their scope, Balsom and Peleg are deliberate in their multiplicities, invoking Ella Shohat’s term “plurilogue.” There is no attempt here at universalizing the experience of women—instead, the largesse of the exhibit (which also includes a publication from MIT and a museum installation) is diligence in the current discourse. Here there is no discussion of “lost” or “rediscovered” works, claims that always centre a white, Western experience. There is, if anything, a deliberate moving away from concepts like a “female” or “feminist” gaze, and anyway, these are not films whose sole concern is responding to more dominant strains of filmmaking. Instead, the focus is on the many ways these filmmakers are world-making, in a very different way than Hollywood’s synergy-driven cinematic
