The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

ealm of the marginalized, and further focusing on the distribution/exhibition practices
that operate outside the mainstream enables the description of the edges of a larger, more
organic but less understood picture of community-oriented media in particular and
democracy in general.
The Community/Commercial Continuum
Some pages into the first chapter of Charles Acland’s Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes
and Global Culture is a suggested Foucauldian foundation for cultural analyses. Acland
writes: “In all cultural analysis we might pose the question: What is the relationship
between the emergent and the residual and between the appearance of novelty and of
repetition?” (2003, p.17) Acland then discusses a “Gramscian approach to cultural
critique” in order to “produce a historical portrait of the dynamic relations between
dominant and subordinate forms and practices” (Ibid) so that a path of action may be
well-informed (radical intervention, parallel alternatives, and evolutionary reformation
are exampled). Acland is mainly concerned with dynamic emergent and residual qualities
of global cinema’s increasingly dominant space of exhibition and consumption – the
megaplex. His excellent analysis of the cultural and economic implications of
commercial theatres and theatergoing provides the type of expansive cultural critique that
has yet to be written for distribution/exhibition spaces operating largely outside of the
commercial mainstream, sites of participation and consumption I describe as community-
oriented spaces. In a research statement that would only need the words “motion picture
theatre” changed to “community-oriented alternative practices” to effectively describe
my own thesis research focus, Acland declares:
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