Breaking Authorship System: Collaborative Filmmaking Practices and Transmedia Narratives in the Digital Age

This article analyses different proposals of collaborative film creation that reject single authorship. Firstly, the reach and significance of two groups of filmmakers in the Spanish context, the Colectivo Cine de Clase and the Colectivo Cine Sin Autor. Belonging to different periods, both collectives find a connection in their collaborative creation, which also implies a rupture with the mythologization of single authorship. The article addresses this common removal of individual narrative in audiovisual creation teams in order to then focus on their social basis as well as on their attempt to establish new ways of representation. Then we analyse other types of participatory cinema, which is characteristic of the digital era, that also include collective authorship. They often incorporate recent creation formats, processes and approaches, among which we emphasise transmedia narratives, which, occasionally, create new perspectives on authorship. After providing a discussion on the contributions and limits of this collaborative creation model to which the selected cases belong, we mention some contributions that these creation approaches, especially transmedia narratives, can offer to contemporary participatory cinema and to collective authorship.