The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

writes: “The strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity is this
immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products.” (Williams, 1977,
p.128) Much of the discourse that looks at documentary cinema is not concerned with the
“experience” of distributing or exhibiting docs, but rather the interplay between the box
office (or market), audience (or marketing), and the ‘finished product’ of the actual film.
Williams shares a concern for cultural hegemony, posed against reductionism, and his
cultural hypothesis of a “structure of feeling” is a theoretical maneuver that opens up
practices and spaces (or experiences) such as those around documentary d/e, to
complicate them as processes and not mere products or points in a historical timeline.
By theorizing cultural practices as non-static, complex articulations of social
experience, pathways to understanding alternative or grassroots spaces open, as well as
ways of seeing these formations as socially significant sites of resistance and community.
These cultural “relations” that have been neglected from the discussions on documentary
- once considered under Williams’s terms - become as important to the social project of
democracy and culture as textual analysis has in other studies. Grassroots spaces and
practices around the dissemination and exposition of documentary cinema are part of
various structures of feelings that the discursive formations visited in this chapter have
revealed as counterpublics, alternative media spaces, cultural interventions and more.
Williams summarizes the importance of situating cultural practices as structures of
feelings:
…as a matter of cultural theory this is a way of defining forms and
conventions in art and literature as inalienable elements of a social
material process: not by derivation from other social forms and pre-forms,
but as social formation of a specific kind which may in turn be seen as the
articulation (often the only fully available articulation) of structures of
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