The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

public: they work the raw material of everyday life, which, in contrast to the traditional
forms of publicity, derive their penetrative force directly from capitalist production.”
(Ibid, p.63) The dominant neoliberal discourse seeks to erase the boundaries between
democracy and capitalism, collapsing them together as an intertwined inevitability of the
so-called logic of humanity. (Giroux, 2004, p.25) Giroux writes: “Within this dystopian
universe, the public realm is increasingly reduced to an instrumental space in which
individuality reduces self-development to the relentless pursuit of personal interests…”
(Ibid) Countering this picture are the examples mentioned in this thesis, and countless
other spaces across Canada where groups and individuals are rejecting the dystopian
vision of individualism and “consumer-choice democracy” and instead building
heterogeneous contact zones of media, culture and community.
The nexus for these contact zones is cinema, and as a medium, it provides
opportunities to transform the experience of spectatorship into participation, with the
proper context of course. Uricchio writes: “As an expressive medium, film has the
capacity for critical contestation and cultural unification, for creative tension and
variation as a source of cultural renewal. As a mass medium, it has the potential to share
this process, reaching across islands of parochial interest by constructing new publics.”
(Uricchio, 1996) In this way, grassroots d/e spaces and practices use cinema to express
collective identity through political engagement and civic empowerment. Mouffe writes
that power is at the centre of challenges to hegemony: “But if we accept that relations of
power are constitutive of the social, then the main question for democratic politics is not
how to eliminate power but how to constitute forms of power more compatible with
democratic values.” (Mouffe, 2000, p.14) This is the essence of grassroots d/e practices
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