This audiovisual essay by Jiří Anger and Jiří Žák focuses on the « trick montage » technique that the Czech filmmaker Alfréd Radok designed for his 1948 film Distant Journey, that sees the screen split between two images – one belonging to the film's fictional diegesis, the other a historical audiovisual document. Anger and Žák re-activate this editing technique performatively by staging their research on the desktop of their computer, where images also routinely co-exist on one screen, framed by different browsers and windows. The confrontation between these older and newer forms of image juxtaposition is presented by the authors as a way to explore the similarities and differences between their respective modes of operation.

The intellectual and formal experiment proposed by the video essay is undisputably fascinating; after watching it, and reading the authors' accompanying statement, I was left with many questions. For instance, the authors' comments on Jaimie Baron's instrumental notion of the « false archive effect » made me wonder: are they suggesting that the inclusion of the documentary sequences in Distant Journey have the effect that the fictional scenes are perceived as (false) archives ? that for today's viewer, both the film's documentary and the fictional scenes have indeed become archives ? that the juxtaposition of different media in various co-existing frames – an avant-garde technique that has been normalized by the development desktop interfaces – can't but lead to a derealization of all (documentary and fictional) images ?

My second remark concerns the literature mentioned in the written essay. It seems to me that the contribution could have benefitted from refering to Harun Farocki's notions of « counter-image » and « soft montage », especially as they have been theorized by Georges Didi-Huberman (among others) in relation to images of the Holocaust. Literature about image juxtaposition in desktop films and more broadly in computer interfaces could also have been explored further, such as Lev Manovich's seminal writings about the cinematic heritage of language of new media, or more recently Miriam de Rosa or Jan Distelmeyer's texts on desktop cinema (whose texts are only briefly acknowledged in the author's supporting statement).

Yet in its current state, this contribution constitutes an original contribution to both fields of Film and Media Studies, and perhaps most importantly, a significant exploration of the affordances of the « desktop documentary » form in a videographic context.