The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

“working-class counter-hegemonic movement,” (Ibid) sifting cultural experience such as
d/e practices presents itself as another site of investigation within a historical process.
Grassroots documentary d/e spaces are sites where counter-hegemonic practices –
including those around grassroots or community-oriented documentary distribution and
exhibition in Canada – develop and maintain the tools, language and process that build
what Gramsci calls “contradictory consciousness.” (Gramsci, eds. Hoare and Smith,
1971, p.16). For Gramsci, consent is complex, and as a theorist firmly positioned against
reductionism of any kind, he also did not see the relationship between dominant cultural
currents and subordinated ones as linear, but as embodied in the fluid and complicated
construction of consciousness that is each individual’s mental project. Williams connects
said mental project(s) with social experience in order to complicate and understand
cultural phenomena. In other words, just as the continuum of mainstream and alternative
media articulations are always in a state of process and change, so too is hegemony as a
cultural force always in a state of fluidity, flux, change and process.
A Gramscian analysis to cultural practices (such as those highlighted in Chapter
IV) offers hope out of the binding dialectic of production/consciousness. American
multinationals, and Hollywood in particular, have contributed to a cultural hegemony
from interconnected economic, cultural and psychological relationships, and throughout
history have at times formed what the Italian writer calls a “historical bloc.” (Gramsci,
1985, p.465) Peet explains that “Gramsci saw structures of physical means of production
and social relations shaped by, and shaping, superstructures of ideology and political
organization to form what he called historic blocks [sic].” (Peet, 2002, p.56) Hegemony,
or “a prevailing common sense formed in culture, diffused by civic institutions,” (Ibid) is
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