What is a Desktop Film?
By Matan Tal
A desktop film is a film that happens on the screen—the desktop of a computer, the interface of a phone, the digital spaces we inhabit for most of our waking lives. But to truly understand what a desktop film is, we first need to clarify what it isn't.
What a Desktop Film Is Not
A desktop film is not a video essay. It's not a YouTube video. It's not necessarily a horror film in the "Screenlife" style that has become prevalent in recent years—think films like Searching or Unfriended. While these films do take place on screens, they represent only one possible direction within a much broader terrain.
Desktop Film as Location-Driven Cinema
At its core, a desktop film is a sub-genre of the essay film genre. It's a location-driven form of cinema—much like the Western is a location-driven genre. A Western film takes place on the frontier, in a specific space and time that defines its aesthetic and thematic possibilities. Similarly, a desktop film follows a parallel rule: it happens on the screen.
This location is temporal as well as spatial. The way a screen looks immediately reveals when the film was made. A ten-year-old desktop film is unmistakably a ten-year-old desktop film—the digital environment changes rapidly year by year, operating systems evolve, interfaces transform. This temporal specificity is part of what makes desktop film such a powerful documentary tool for capturing our contemporary moment.
The Desktop as Documentary Space
The desktop is inherently an environment for essay film. When you document life on the screen, you automatically enter essay territory—you're working within the French concept of caméra-stylo, the camera-pen. You're filming exactly what your eyes are looking at, what you see. It's the most personal, observational filmmaking experience possible.
A desktop documentary—a form I find particularly compelling—is inherently an essay film. The limitations of documenting on the screen automatically place you in this mode. But within this territory, the form can branch in two directions: toward the video essay or toward the film essay.
Film Essay vs. Video Essay
The distinction matters. A video essay is more didactic, more academic. It has a specific point to make—it's fundamentally an analytical tool. Think of it as something you might submit instead of a traditional written paper in film studies. It's about making an argument, analyzing patterns, presenting a thesis.
I actually fought for this at my film school once. I argued that film students pursuing a theoretical degree should be allowed to submit video essays instead of regular essays for some courses. At least they would have something to show when they leave school—some form of film or editing work that could help them get a job. Because otherwise, a film studies degree was arguably the most worthless degree one could pursue.
A film essay, by contrast, is a more comprehensive film experience. I wouldn't say it's less serious, but it doesn't necessarily operate in an academic register. It doesn't have to be about cinema at all. The approach can be more subjective, more personal. There's a persona behind the camera rather than just an analytical voice conducting didactic analysis. The film essay embraces personality, subjectivity, the filmmaker's unique perspective on experience.
Why Desktop Film Matters
A desktop film explores the digital world—the realm that occupies most of our waking hours, where we spend our working lives. Exploring these digital realms has become our second reality. Sometimes this reality affects our physical existence more than we're willing to admit, more than we like to accept.
It's a different universe we inhabit online. We have our own avatars, our own identities, our own personas—sometimes vastly different from who we are in our physical lives. The desktop film is a form that deals with all these questions of our digital era, addressing some of the most urgent questions of the 21st century.
Yes, the desktop film format could be adopted for horror. It could be used for video essays. But at its core, it belongs to the essay film tradition. It is part of that lineage—a natural evolution of the essay film for our screen-dominated age.
The Desktop Film as Personal Cinema
Desktop film helps the individual filmmaker articulate their experience—the questions, anxieties, and joys they encounter in today's virtual life that we all share. It's cinema that exists in a space that is simultaneously baseless and spatial, a ghostly realm that nonetheless feels utterly concrete to those who inhabit it.
This is what makes desktop film such an accurate and necessary form for our moment. It's a way of filming that captures the texture of contemporary existence—not as metaphor or representation, but as direct documentation. When we film the desktop, we're filming our actual lived experience, the space where so much of modern life genuinely takes place.
In the end, a desktop film is cinema that acknowledges and embraces where we actually are: on the screen, in the digital realm, navigating the strange hybrid space between the physical and virtual that defines 21st-century life. It's filmmaking for the world we actually live in.
