The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

dominant veneers in culture, so that groups and individuals of varying oppressed or
marginalized degrees are able to find space in order to experience their (social) world.
The small communities Film Circuit caters to are indeed marginalized from cinema
culture – their chapters exist to fill a cultural void in their respective community, in order
to bring diverse, independent cinema into smaller towns, and under the fence of the
megaplex as it were (although, curiously, often aided and abetted by commercial theatres
driven by profit still). Film Circuit is indicative of the complexity of the ideas of
community and commercial, with its emphasis on community empowerment and its
artifice of commercial (often chain) exhibition sites. The complexity of commercial
cinema cites and community is perhaps described by Negt et al. here: “… the productive
structure of publicity, and the non-public experience linked with it, separates itself from
its mere manifestation in the apparatus of distribution – publicity as a finished product
that is publicly experienced.” (Negt, Kluge and Labanyi, 1988, p.74) Film Circuit is
facilitating the desires of localized groups to shape their own programming and spaces
around such programming, while at the same time they provide opportunities for
commercial theatres to make profits from such ventures. In other words, the publicness of
the screenings is negotiated between the community of Film Circuit organizers and the
management at the particular theatre. At these screenings, citizens are empowered as
community members articulating cultural exchange, and thus challenge the mere
consumption aspect of the “finished product” of a film and realize the potential of a
shared, “public experience.”
Negt et al. discuss the dominant “production public sphere” that is forming the
boundaries that make up the “façade of legitimation” as one in which the “roots are not
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