The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

production, exhibition and distribution) in the “Hollywood” system, and the
“collaborative” process he sees occurring in the independent sector. One thing is certain:
distribution and exhibition are collapsing into each other, whether it is facilitated (or
forced) by multinationals vertically integrating their media systems, technological
advances such as direct web-broadcast applications and platforms (such as Miro), or
grassroots organizers procuring films, showing them in public spaces, and sharing the
work within networks. Later in this thesis, a filmmaker and activist describes moving
around the USA and Canada with canisters of film in order to show “community”
screenings. Whether it is digits, discs or tape, the movement and sharing of cinema,
including documentary, is revealed in the spaces explored in the following pages.
The recent ascension of documentary films into the popular psyche of the West as
well as into global commercial markets is causing increased attention from the popular
press and academics from disciplines as disparate as cinema studies and
macroeconomics, (with an emergent coterie of legal-minded writers concerned with
“risk” and “security” around digital considerations). Rare exceptions to the fiction-
dominated box office rulebook are continuously trotted out, put on display and celebrated
as proof of the genre’s movement toward the mainstream. Films like Bowling for
Columbine (2004), March of the Penguins (2005), Touching the Void (2004), and more
recently, Sicko (2007) are exampled as the champion invaders into (fiction) fortress
Hollywood. However, one need only examine a top-grossing documentaries list for a
minute to discover that by sixth place the film hails from 1991, perhaps not a strong
endorsement for evidence of a plethora of documentary box office hits in the last decade.
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