The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

networks, pockets of resistance and counter-hegemonies take shape as community-
oriented media spaces. Such are those of grassroots distribution and exhibition.
The ways in which media are shared and experienced are as equally important as
the content itself. Communications scholar Marshall McLuhan famously captured this
emphasis on delivery in a popularized adage when he wrote, “The medium is the
message.” (McLuhan, 1964) Especially prolific have been the political economy studies
of a Hollywood-dominated global entertainment system, where scholars track products
from script inception within the film furnaces of Los Angeles to the black-market DVDs
being sold under canopies on the streets of Bangkok. Intrepid investigators have traced
the movements of tape, celluloid, disc and digits as they travel the globe in search of
primary, secondary and ancillary markets. Toby Miller has identified this phenom as
“Global Hollywood,” and devoted two volumes to the discussion of a hegemonic system
that “is simultaneously embraced and rejected by world publics.” (Miller, 2005, p.2)
Even localized studies of national cinemas – such as Eirini Sifaki’s 2003 study of
the declining outdoor cinema experience in Greece – tend to emphasize a domination by
Hollywood where distribution and exhibition are discussed in terms of domestic market
subordination and the resulting “occupation” by megaplexes exhibiting American
product. (2003, pp. 243-257) Similarly, Kerr and Flynn’s paper on the movie and games
industries in Ireland highlights global media institutions that are becoming “more
concentrated over time and developing into oligopolies” such that “Irish producers are
unable to break into a distribution system which remains dominated by global-scale
players.” (Kerr and Flynn, 2003, pp. 3 and 19) In the Irish study, the researchers connect
with this inquiry by discussing “counter movements to maintain diversity of media
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