The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

demonstrative examples of the academic work as of late. I now turn to another author
pushing boundaries in her reading of documentary cinema.
Patricia Zimmermann’s book States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars,
Democracies, draws the discursive spaces of cultural hegemony, public sphere and
counterpublics, and media and democracy together into writing that celebrates
documentary cinema as intervention. While much of the book is devoted to mapping the
siphoning of public funding for the arts in the USA Zimmermann consistently connects
documentary practices with social movements and political struggles. While it has been
stated on previous pages that these alternative media practices are indeed heterogeneous,
and should not be reduced to “resistance media,” or “activist cinema,” it is insightful to
draw on recent work by Zimmermann and others like David Whitefield, in discussing
documentary practices as counterpublics, counter-hegemonies, and socio-political and/or
cultural, interventions.
Zimmermann however, focuses on production and textual analysis to a fault. The
“war” that she describes is one over the public arts, and on one side are myopic
governments and avaricious corporations, and on the other, an activist army made up of
media producers. While her work would benefit with some mention of the sites and
practices around the distribution and exhibition of documentary cinema, her analysis is
useful for adding another layer to the theories explored in these pages. The discursive
formations that have been described represent an inverse pyramid: at the apex are
localized interventions around documentary d/e, at the base are private/public spheres
dominated by large, powerful entities that produce a cultural hegemony which keep the
imbalance.
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