The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

large multinational corporations who dominate Canada’s, and much of the West’s,
mediascape. 5 This has not been accomplished by force, although fascinating inroads
continue to be made by scholars concerning the confluence of militarism and
entertainment – sometimes called “militainment” or the Military Entertainment Complex.
(Lenoir, 2000; Stockwell and Muir, 2003, p.14; Lawrence, 2005) Barring this
consideration of media that promotes or is ultimately concerned with a non-critical stance
on militarism or violent culture, the global media oligarchy currently maintains its status
by consent, not force.
However, it is a consent maintained through the control and manipulation of
choice. If three commercially-oriented multinationals own and control nearly 80% of one
industry in a country, and the products that flow through this cartel (Straw, 1993) are not
differentiated by any discernible quality other than a kind of “one-upmanship” 6 within a
genre (bigger budgets, bigger stars, bigger marketing campaigns), would it not be
reasonable to say that the consumers or audience members at the other end of this
industry are given little choice, and forced to “decide” between products that are more
similar than they are different? The industry scenario just described is Canada’s
commercial cinema exhibition industry, and while there is the odd foreign, documentary,
art house, or independent work that screens ephemerally and periodically in this matrix of
concentrated ownership, many surveys carried out by the industry itself show that there is
little choice outside deciding between texts that have originated creatively and/or fiscally
from Hollywood.
5 Including all of the same authors cited in Chapter I, on page 13, paragraph 2.
6 A gender-specific term that captures the volatile, bellicose, and male-dominated business world
of commercial distribution and exhibition.
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