The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

the lens of inequity, where cultural ‘pipes’ originate within American cultural and
financial institutions and flow into and through Canadian publics. This line of
argumentation – the “Americanization” of cultural spaces/production in Canada – has
also been rightly critiqued by Acland and others as essentialist and a dead-end
investigation. As Bhabha reminds, the location of culture is a stratum in the complex
inquiry into globalization, colonialism, hegemony and culture. He writes:
What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to
think beyond narratives and to focus on those moments or processes that
are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in between’
spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular
or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of
collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society
itself. (Bhabha, 1994, p.2)
To find the ‘in between spaces’ concerning an inquiry into Canadian cinema, whether an
attempt at defining society is embarked on or not, distribution and exhibition remain
integral.
To award the merit the quandary deserves as an incredibly intricate and
indispensable part of the history of Canadian film, d/e needs to be woven into every text
that seeks to provide a complicated and supra-textual analysis of the country’s cinema
and cinema practices. This cementing of d/e as an integral element to the ‘national
discussion of culture’ is akin to Miller et al. calling for the ubiquitous element of labour
to be woven into every discussion of the political economy of media, including film.
(Miller et al., 2005, p.7) While those authors site the need to reference what they call the
New International Division of Cultural Labour (NIDCL) at every turn possible, there is a
corresponding need to include the political economy and cultural implications of d/e in
serious Canadian conversations on cinema. Miller, Govil, McMurria, Maxwell and
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