Abstract
Desktop documentary has firmly established itself as a reflexive form that directly addresses the screen-mediated nature of our lives. This genre on the border between film theory and practice treats the computer/mobile screen as both a camera lens and a canvas and seeks to depict and question how we explore the world through the screen. Crucially, unlike previous forms of cinematic theoretical practice, such as the 1970s counter-cinema, desktop documentary incorporates both reflexivity and narrativization. While it lays bare the inner workings of the apparatus, at the same time, it assimilates them into a relatively coherent and accessible narrative.
This paper aims to understand how this paradoxical marriage between reflexivity and narrativization works. In which ways can the desktop documentary genre be reconceived as a successor to the 1970s counter-cinema, and in which ways does it constitute a break from it? A term that will enable us to stage an encounter between the old and the new, narrativization and reflexivity, revealing and concealing, is suture. This concept and its recent revisions will present desktop documentary as a staged process of welding together elements surfacing on the screen that brings the author, the apparatus, and the spectator on the same plane.