The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

to the year it was published, and provides some analysis around issues such as gender,
queer politics, and race. Bruzzi, unlike Barnouw, focuses largely on Western-Anglo
documentaries, and thus does not fulfill the anticipated and much-needed international
survey of the genre. Gaines’s work is relatively prolific, with an emphasis on women and
cinema. While Gaines has also cast a wide net into the ocean of fiction cinema, her
forthcoming book promises to focus on non-fiction, and the suggestive title of The
Documentary Destiny of Cinema seems to prescribe to the future the continued ascension
of the genre within the mediascape.
Nichols’s oeuvre is perhaps the most accessed by educators, with his Introduction
to Documentary (2001) providing yet another (Western-Anglo-centric) survey of the
genre, using individual films to highlight trends and shifts in the field. While many
(including Lacey) point to the success of a handful of films like Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore,
2004), Supersize Me (Spurlock, 2004) and The Corporation (Achbar and Abbott, 2003)
as the arbiters of the ascension of documentaries in predominantly Western nations, an
increasingly robust group of academics are colouring the cultural spotlight of the
documentary form. Among recent contributions, Paul Ward’s Documentary: The
Margins of Reality (2005) pushes the boundaries of a film-by-film and interview-by-
interview account of the trajectory of non-fiction cinema, by interrogating new blurred
borders of documentary, from the hybrid films of Nick Broomfield to internet sites. There
is also an endless supply of literature on making documentaries, from DIY manifestos to
video activist handbooks. Again, these works too often focus on production at the cost of
d/e. While the handful of authors and works just listed are important pieces in the
“documenting of documentary,” (Nichols, Grant and Sloniowski, 2002) they are
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