The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

important works have been published by women, including the very recent Projecting
Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film Board (2007)
by Zoë Druick, the highly contested The Colonized Eye: Rethinking the Greirson Legend
(1998) by Joyce Nelson, and countless articles by Sandra Gathercole including “The Best
Film Policy this Country Never Had.” (1978) Much of the writing on film policy that has
come to dominate the discursive spaces within the Canadian academy remains authored
by men, while women – such as Gathercole – have seen fairer representation in industry
and popular publications.
The film industry is indeed constructed out of the clay of capitalist patriarchy, and
the content of films as well as the context in which they are made and disseminated tend
toward patriarchal qualities. Film theory seems to have followed suit, with the bulk of
academics or “professional critics” mirroring gender inequity found throughout the
industry. Sue Thornham, paraphrasing an Editorial from Women and Film (1972) in the
introduction to Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, articulates this observation:
Women, the editors go on, are oppressed within the film industry (they are
‘receptionists, secretaries, odd job girls, prop girls’ etc.); they are
oppressed by being packaged as images (sex objects, victims or vampires);
and lastly they are oppressed within film theory, by male critics…It is in
this climate, then, that feminist film theory begins – as an urgent political
act. (Thornham, 1999, p.10)
Interestingly, neither Thornham’s introduction, nor the whole Feminist Film Theory
Reader, address distribution and exhibition from a feminist perspective or otherwise.
Feminist film theory, while articulating a much-needed stance that challenges the
oppressive, patriarchal environment of cinema (both the industry and theory), mirrors the
same essentialism replete throughout the academy – textual analysis is focused on at the
exclusion of supra-textual considerations such are those of d/e.
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