The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

Zimmermann is interested in the piercing potential of the apex, and sets the tone
for documentary as a combative force in the following passage from her aforementioned
book: “Documentaries repudiate the fictions of the nation with the real, the document, the
historical, the particular, and it is these negations and refusals that provoke the offensives
to close down all public cultures.” (2000, p.15) And while her argumentation tends
toward the type of binaries that Mouffe seeks to overcome, Zimmermann invigorates the
documentary genre by treating it as a force with which to combat cultural hegemony,
either as the films themselves, or in the case of this inquiry, as practices around
dissemination and public viewing.
While her metaphorical and bombastic language may be difficult for the so-called
non-converted to accept, there is a war of sorts that exists over the public spaces in
advanced capitalist societies. She writes: “It is a war about whether public spaces will
exist; whether they will be zones of fantasy projections for the transnationals, or zones of
contestation, insurgency, and community with access to the means of production and
distribution.” (Ibid, p. 14) Zimmermann offers two alternatives, but in this inquiry I argue
that there are in fact multiple, overlapping, interlocking positions in the “war.” Three
have been identified by Rodriguez and company, and are used to complicate
Zimmermann’s notion of the battleground. That said, she is describing an insurrection
over public space, and in fact, the act of creating counterpublics and counter-hegemonies.
Following this, Zimmermann does at times harmonize with Mouffe, as in the following
passage, pitting homogenous liberalism against heterogeneous collectivism (community):
This is a war over a discursive territory, a war over how the public spaces
of the nation are defined and mapped, a war between the faux
homogeneity of corporatist multiculturalism that absorbs and vaporizes
difference and a radical heterogeneity that positions difference(s) and
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