Seventy years after Benjamin, the late curator Okwui Enwezor revived the theorist’s thinking in his own short talk. In “The Artist as Producer in Times of Crisis” (2004), Enwezor interpreted Benjamin’s reflection as asking, “to what degree does political awareness in a work of art become a tool for the deracination of the autonomy of the work and that of the author?” According to Enwezor, an artwork’s political stakes can distance it from its maker through what Benjamin termed “technique,” which, the latter claimed, would do away with “the sterile opposition between form and content” by resituating these elements of authorial intention in the political domain. Enwezor offered the technique of the collective as an alternative to that of the single author as one that “performs an operation of irruption and transformation on traditional mechanisms and activities of artistic production which locates the sole figure of the individual artist at the center of authorship.” Enwezor embraced the promise of collective practice (“shared labor; collaborative practice; the collective conceptualization of artistic work”) to destabilize both the singular author and their corresponding authority through a “critique of the reification of art and the commodification of the artist.”

While Enwezor’s comments speak to an ongoing foregrounding of collective work, collective practices’ challenges to traditional models of authorship and authority are tested today by dominant art world institutions. The recent documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany, is one example. There, a citywide exhibition was for the first time organized by a working collective of artists, the Indonesia-based ruangrupa, and featured a variety of other art collectives and collaborative groups. Critics of documenta fifteen targeted what they claimed was a privileging of social process over product, while others attacked what was perceived by some as artists’ overstepping their bounds into the political sphere. In either case, the challenges to collective work were substantial, which perhaps demonstrates that it is performing the disruptive role that Enwezor described. At the same time, as their simultaneous acceptance by the contemporary art establishment demonstrates, collective processes cannot be expected to challenge authorial alienation alone.

Following Enwezor, I return to Benjamin’s assertion that his “apparatus is better to the degree that it leads consumers to production, in short that it is capable of makig co-workers out of readers or spectators.” By deconstructing the binary opposition between maker and spectator, Benjamin not only suggests the facilitation of access, but that authority itself should be redistributed, including to those who are not themselves creators of artwork but who participate in its production of meaning. Marion von Osten (2010) claims Benjamin “was calling for practice that transforms the cultural apparatus in such a way that readers (in our case, viewers) are turned into producers.” Documentary film’s authority is specific–its most privileged hold on our grammar is related to concepts of “truth” and “reality.” For a documentary work to deconstruct its authorship is thus to destabilize the existing power dynamics and to allow spectators to participate in the interpretation of these concepts.

So-called “hybrid” filmmaking has grown exponentially in recent years, as demonstrated by its popularity in streaming media. Here, I propose to think of hybrid filmmaking, usually taken to refer to a style situated between fiction and documentary (and drawing upon both approaches), as a process of political meaning-making with regard to dominant regimes of media, knowledge, and truth production through the intentional ambiguity with its authors frequently destabilize these same models. But I would also like to distinguish between works that simply employ hybrid strategies—for example, appropriating the aesthetics of fiction film in a documentary production—and those that do so with the express goal of destabilizing expectations of genre for larger purposes.

When achieved with certain aims, hybrid filmmaking provides a means for documentary filmmakers to subvert their own authority intentionally. A film like Sara Gómez’s De Cierta Manera (1974) speaks beyond its more immediate context of post-revolutionary Cuba by destabilizing its own narrative voice in a way that is critical of documentary and political authority through its more ambiguous depiction of its subjects. I am specifically referring to Gómez’s challenge to dominant representations of class, race, and the meaning ascribed to the documentary v. narrative form in her film. Gómez’s approach is an example of Benjamin’s “technique,” blending form and content in its invitation that spectators participate in its creation of meaning, in the process creating a critical spectator. Today, it is especially important to recall work such as this that does not reduce its hybridity to questions of form alone.

Such divergent practices always face the risk of co-optation, subversion, and exclusion. As Benjamin’s frequent interlocutor Bertolt Brecht reminds us, “the truth can be suppressed in many ways and must be expressed in many ways.” Given the current vogue of hybrid work in film and other audiovisual media, it is ever more important to examine such work critically and consider the limits of form when it is separated from a simultaneous consideration of its conditions of production, no less vital today than it was in Benjamin’s original formula. The hybrid filmmaking I speak of proposes a context-specific consideration of the ways in which truth has been traditionally represented and a critique of those same hegemonic modes of representation, but it also demands to be questioned and updated, especially as it enters the mainstream.

It is worth mentioning that my adoption of Benjamin’s term “producer” signifies something rather different for documentary film today than it did for literature in the 1930s. Whereas in filmmaking, the producer plays a discrete organizational and financial role, the “production” that Benjamin alludes to was intended to allude to economic processes, at that time broadly conceived as socialist or capitalist in nature, and not a distinct professional category. But we can also consider the pervasive separation of a film’s creative conceptualization and process from its relations with production, beyond more artisanal or experimental productions where roles are assumed by fewer people (or one person) by financial necessity. Is it not possible to read into the division between “producer” and “director” an artificial partition between cinema’s common dependence on both art and commerce? While filmmakers might prefer to stand outside certain “relations of production” we may more constructively consider our artistic work as part of pervasive economic processes. In the spirit of both Benjamin and Enwezor, refiguring the “filmmaker” as also a “producer” alludes to different realms of value with which the making of documentary films are part and allows us to reconsider how the ways we work relate to how, what, and to whom we intend to communicate.

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