Abstract

Documentary cinema has emerged as an important focus for research into popular culture, marginalized narratives, and democratic media. However, academic work on the genre has been narrowly focused on audience consumption habits, aesthetic or textual analyses of individual works, and cultural analyses of the intersection of documentary and mainstream commercial cinema sites and practices. This thesis is an attempt to bridge a research gap by interrogating extra-textual elements around the grassroots distribution and exhibition of documentary cinema in Canada. By linking the concepts of cultural hegemony, counterpublics and agonostic pluralism with community-oriented practices around documentary distribution and exhibition, this thesis urges a closer look at the spaces between box office numbers, high profile documentaries, and megaplexes. Springboarding from disparate literature, the thesis builds a conceptual framework around power and community, and uses firsthand interviews with filmmakers, promoters, exhibitors and distributors to tease out the relationship between documentary cinema and counterpublics in Canada.