The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

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their own community-oriented spaces with the some of the same tools used to build the “master’s house.” ( , ed., 2002, p.193) Film Circuit and its 200 affiliates spread across Canada is the active engagement of moving through the interplay of cultural hegemony and counterpublics (again, as described in Chapter II). What makes Film Circuit so interesting and crucial to this study is that it is a kind of hybrid response to the problem of Canada’s cinema(s). It is not a radical intervention in the Zimmermann sense, nor is it a corporate marketing ploy posing as grassroots, otherwise known as “astroturf” (Beder, 1998; Patel, 2005). It is an initiative created with one of the elements of Canada’s cinema problem space, the distributor/exhibitors not in an effort to reform their political economy or even their standard practices, but rather their associative structure and the spaces where they ‘do business.’ There is a certain Trojan Horse element to Film Circuit; Haynes has found a way to get more diverse content, including documentary and Canadian works, into commercial cinema spaces, by establishing a fair playing field for all three stakeholders (the thirds split mentioned earlier). Like Dodds and Achbar, Haynes is rightly concerned with building an audience, and says: “We need a more concentrated effort to get these films into the mainstream and most of all we need to build an audience.” (Ibid, p.5) It’s a building process that is not happening completely outside the dominant sphere of commercial cinema, but rather smaller spheres that introduce the margins slowly, are being built inside the otherwise impenetrable Hollywood fortresses of mainstream exhibition sites. The ‘mainstream’ that Film Circuit is operating in extends across the country, and includes very small communities like Bowen Island, BC, as well as larger communities 116
like Charlottetown, PEI. The initiative seems to have some kind of tried and tested formula for its success, as Haynes describes: I spent five years or so trying to come up with the perfect formula for having an independent film achieve success at the box office. We found that if we played the film for one week, everyone would lose in the end – the exhibitor, the distributor, and the marketer, but condense that one week into one night and everyone does OK…And, how can you really market a film like Scared Sacred in the same theatre as Lord of the Rings?..So in the end, with the one night screenings, [this varies, some Film Circuit screenings run more than one evening] the theatre got his theatre full, the distributor got his films shown, and the local group organizing the screening could successfully market the film to the community. (Ibid, p.2) While this approach – having minimal time slotted for independent works – appears to be a “soft” advance from the Indy margins to the megaplex mainstream, it is a start. Haynes and many others in the industry realize that an audience for diverse content – different from what has been in the theatres for the last 70 years – will not materialize over night, it has to be built brick by brick (or in this case, bum by bum). Or, as Kirwan Cox puts it: “Canadian audiences that are used to riding around in Cadillacs don’t want to suddenly switch to riding bicycles,” (Personal Interview, 2007, p3) in reference to audiences getting accustomed to lower budget, independent, films. The grassroots response to the lack of diversity in Canada’s d/e networks and sites is multifaceted, and I would argue, a unifying, linking ingredient to all grassroots d/e initiatives is the orientation around community, it bears consideration that community itself is heterogeneous. Mitchell used grassroots d/e to help build a movement of First Nations communities in their struggle against an oppressive state and society; Achbar located his initial screenings of what would ultimately be an incredibly commercially successful documentary in communities he sought solidarity and support from, and in return, allowed his film to flow through channels and networks that formed the 117
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The Spaces Between Grassroots Docum
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iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis wou
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CHAPTER I HOT DOCUMENTARIES IN COOL
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p.167) Yet what brings Wintonick an
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Complimenting the celebration of ex
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somewhere. Documentaries make up a
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ealm of the marginalized, and furth
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short, there is a clear and urgent
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discussion and treats them as unnat
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content” (Ibid, p.3) reminiscent
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examines and exposes these phenomen
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some years working as an activist a
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grassroots distribution and exhibit
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the discursive and physical multipl
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attention in some areas, such as te
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writes: “The strongest barrier to
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its heyday 4 . Stuart Hall, Richard
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large multinational corporations wh
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it is a complex process of negotiat
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globally harmonized by a populist c
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(counterpublics) - such is the way
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She is concerned with the counter-h
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operating with an assumption that t
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film through the public sphere.”
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commercial exhibition sites, and fu
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adicalizing opposition or counterpo
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screenings can provide opportunity
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authors have chosen to survey the g
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demonstrative examples of the acade
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conflict(s) as a core of contestati
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consumer-over-citizen modeled (Mouf
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CHAPTER III - HISTORICAL CONTEXT -
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vis the ‘work’ of politicians,
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These authors are introducing the t
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Page 77 and 78: As mentioned, d/e has been at the h
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Page 127 and 128: That said, AMC is paying more atten
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Page 139 and 140: APPENDIX B Sample Interview Questio
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Page 145 and 146: Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from C
Page 147 and 148: Magder, Ted. Canada’s Hollywood:
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Page 151 and 152: Yudice, George. “The Privatizatio
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