The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

television in her book, Hand-Held Visions: The Impossible Possibilities of Community
Media (2002).
Zimmermann’s firebrand theories do integrate with other thinkers’ notions of
democracy, including those mentioned in the previous pages. What she shares with other
scholars examining democracy and media is the idea that a democratic public sphere is
dependent on access and diversity (Ibid, p.4). What makes her specifically of interest for
this thesis, however, is that Zimmermann sees documentary as an avenue for achieving
such goals, and embroiders them together as such: “…three of the central tenets
underpinning an oppositional, independent documentary strategy [are]: access, diversity,
and a democratic public sphere.” (Ibid)
Zimmermann’s argument comes at a time when nation-states and their connected
public media institutions are undergoing a constant metamorphosis, a restructuring to fit
with a historical bloc that continues to convince the Western world of the inevitability of
the market (Spicer and Fleming, 2003; Peet, 2002). Free market policies have caused
public funding for the arts, including documentary cinema, to be vigorously slashed
(Observatoire du documentaire/Documentary Network Brief, 2005). As well, media
consolidation puts decision-making power, and resources, into the hands of fewer and
fewer men who are increasingly disconnected from local communities (Norberg-Hodge,
1996; Barnet and Cavanagh, 1996) (Giddens calls this offshoot of globalization
“disembeddedness”). In support of these trends are the media-makers, intellectuals,
academics, educators, and policy-makers Bourdieu (1998) criticizes and chastises, those
who continue to convince constituencies of the utopian fantasy of a “post-political” or
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