Desktop Films
Screen Stories Library - an educational playlist of screen-based films, videos and narrative media
What is Desktop Cinema?
Desktop cinema (also referred to as computer screen film) is an emerging form of film and media making that presents the world as it is experienced through computer screens and networked interfaces. In filmic terms, it treats the computer screen as both a camera lens and a canvas, realizing its potential as an artistic medium.
At its best, desktop cinema not only depicts screen-based experience, but critically reflects on it. To date, this potential has been most fully realized through the form of desktop documentary. If the documentary genre is meant to capture life’s reality, then desktop recording acknowledges that computer screens are now a primary mode of daily experience through an always-on network of audiovisual data. Desktop documentary seeks to both depict and question the ways we explore the world through the computer screen.
Further Resources
Get started with desktop documentary with this tutorial I recorded with Bertha Doc House.
On Desktop Cinema
First presentation on Desktop Cinema, December 2014
Computer screen film Wikipedia entry
“Smartphone, computer, tablet and television screens seem to have the upper hand on the silver screen that is traditionally the habitat of the feature film. Instead of taking the fight (and their content) to those small screens, a number of recent films have opted to bring those digital screens into their cinematic realm in a very radical way.”
From Eisenstein to #Screenlife - Montage for the 21st Century. Desktop-based presentation delivered at Garage Museum as part of the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, September 29 2018.
“How does one transform the online experience into something compelling: narratively, visually, cinematically? Encountering the students… We had to find strategies for them to distantiate themselves from the media they consume and produce every day; our primary mission was to change the nature of their gazes on their screens... Students conducted several short exercises inspired by our research and production methods, in terms of the epistemological (what we know and how we learn it) and the affective (what we feel, and how to convey these affects to others). “
Troubling the Desktop. Co-written with Chloé Galibert-Laîné. Filmmaker Magazine, March 17 2019.
On Desktop Documentary
“While desktop documentary may be a key site for the production of scholarly subjectivity, its full potential may depend on activating other spaces to explore an even richer set of inquiries into the virtualisation of thought, labor, and social interaction and co-presence.”
Desktop Documentary: From Artefact to Artist(ic) Emotions, co-written with Ariel Avissar. NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies, 12.1, 2023
“This form of audiovisual presentation, with its incredibly skilful and brilliantly thought through use of screen capture, has the potential to revolutionise aspects of media studies teaching and learning.”
On Desktop Documentary (or, Kevin B. Lee Goes Meta!) - Catherine Grant, Film Studies for Free
“Desktop documentary is a form that both presents and critically reflects on the world as experienced through computer screens and online interfaces. Treating the desktop as a medium for non-fiction storytelling proposes a unique set of epistemological dilemmas, affective dimensions, and aesthetic discoveries.”
A desktop documentary does not procure its footage in the usual way (using a camera) but instead sources its images from the internet. Screen capturing software takes the place of the camera, turning the computer screen into both the method of production and of dissemination of such a documentary.”
“In some ways this desktop documentary style was inevitable. Lee et al. are simply taking screen capture technology and the ordinary YouTube instructional video to a higher level.”
