The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

often managed to secure resources required to bring their way of seeing and experiencing
the world to the foreground. In terms of any “Hollywood hegemony” (Miller et al, 2005)
that grips the Canadian film industry, (Beaty, 2006) it is part of a matrix of cultural and
financial forces that form a larger discursive hegemony Bourdieu describes as “The
Tyranny of the Market” (1998) held together by a “façade of legitimation” (Negt, Kluge
and Labanyi, 1988, p.61) This prevailing “common sense.” (Peet, 2002; Bourdieu,
1988a) is indeed neoliberalism. Inherent to this economic ideology of open markets, free
trade and the accumulation of capital (Albo, 2002) is the process of commodification and
control of resources, including media resources (Leys, 2001), especially media cartels
(Negt et al. Ibid). As states and large transnational corporations consolidate costs through
processes of privatization and trade deregulation (Leys, Ibid) some spaces open up while
other close. The spaces for financial firms to trade on “commodities” like timber and
water open up, while the spaces for an independent documentary challenging the
privatization of water (for example) close up, or at least become tighter.
Neoliberal discourse has infected government policy, from natural resources to
cultural expression. In the case of the latter, it can be found in decisions to deregulate
ownership of media in Canada, or in a recent report on the country’s miserable film
industry, where policy writers, in an unabashed nod to the (free) market, state:
“…technology is handing the scheduling keys to the consumer…” (Profile 2007, 2007,
p.5) In a world constructed out of the hegemony of neoliberalism, technology is
anthropomorphized, and becomes a friendly being capable of engendering decision-
making power in consumers, not citizens. This logic would lead to the belief that
technology, or the equally benevolent market, is also capable of handing over content to
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