Electronic public space.

• Author: Aufderheide, Pat
• Position: For film and video documentaries

In the era of the Camcorder, we can all put ourselves on television--if it's our own. The challenge these days is to have something to say to a broader community--and somewhere to say it.

Back in the 1960s, leftwing film and video productions blossomed. There were documentaries of dissent and even of revolution, produced by the firebrands at Newsreel; documentaries about the hidden realities of class and class conflict, like those produced by Kartemquin or by Barbara Kopple; does that recovered buried leftwing histories and history-makers, like the films of Jim Klein and Julia Reichert'

These works popped up occasionally on public television, in repertory theaters, and at schools and colleges. But filmmakers quickly learned the obvious: Audio-visual space is far less expansive than print space. There are only so many screens, and even on the verge of WebTV, only so many channels. The people who control them, furthermore, are used to making ridiculous amounts of money.

Three decades later, dissident filmmaking is still marked by scrappy determination and permanent budgetary crisis. It lives on the margins of mass media. But there are now many more makers, who are more socially diverse and far more diffuse in their political objectives.

Dissident documentary filmmaking no longer rides a political tide. Rather, it reflects the messy complexity of a rudderless political moment. Exposing the reality of injustice among ethnic minorities, working people, women, and gays and lesbians once was provocative and shocking. Now it is familiar, even caricatured (with the help of rightwing ideologues) as multicultural whining. In the 1960s, the personal film, in which the filmmaker searches for his or her identity on screen, was the indulgence of a film-school elite. Now, Cambodian immigrants, gay African Americans, and Ivy League graduates all make that kind of movie.

The challenge is to connect those stories with each other, to see them as part of a larger, shared story, rather than as freakish tales fit for the sleazoid talk shows.

Two organizations that are having birthday parties this summer have been major players in this real-life drama on the small and large screens: the public TV series P.O.V. is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and the feminist film distributor Women Make Movies is now twenty-five years old. They have both been instrumental in putting personal film and videomaking within a social frame, and in carving out space, electronic and...