The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

provides a framework to address alternative or grassroots sites of community-building in
the documentary sector.
Writers like Chantal Mouffe and Clemencia Rodriguez seek to free alternative
media from the theoretical confines of oppositional analysis and so many binaries
(Rodriguez, 2001, p.13), and to recognize these counter-spaces and practices as
legitimate articulations of community (and community media) in their own right.
Rodriguez agrees with Dorothy Kidd when she points out that communication scholars
have been guilty of “relegating alternative media to a footnote” (Ibid.) and have had so
much difficulty in framing alternative media practices as community building blocks
rather than mere oppositional sites of struggle. Indeed, community-oriented sites and
practices around grassroots distribution and exhibition of documentary cinema constitute
complex zones of opposition as well as radical democratic spaces of information access,
sharing, and construction. Counterpublic spaces and practices are sites of empowerment,
(Higgins, 1999) where power is redistributed to – in the case of documentary
distribution/exhibition – artists, audiences, and organizers. For democracy, it is, to quote
a subheading from Rodriguez, where “power explodes, [and] the new political subject
emerges.” (Ibid.) There are concrete examples of these dynamic spaces outlined in
Chapter IV, such as film screenings at raves, and community screenings bridging
understanding between police forces and First Nations groups. Indeed, watching films is
but one element of d/e spaces, where social interaction trumps economic transactions. As
Witness’s recent Video Advocacy Institute, held at Concordia in Montreal, illustrates,
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