Finding a home for the video essay: Videographic criticism and the study of Chinese television drama

Abstract

Although some conflate the digital humanities with data-driven quantitative research, other conceptualizations of the digital humanities emphasize post-print methods of scholarship with unprecedented reach outside of the academy. Video essays are an example of this vision for the digital humanities: they are critiques of film advanced through film itself with crossover appeal to popular audiences. This paper places the author’s personal experience creating a video essay on Chinese television in the context of the state of the field of Chinese television studies and current debates over the function of videographic criticism. Current scholarship on Chinese television often neglects the visuality of the televisual text and the individual experience of television viewing. Because video essays are themselves an audiovisual text, they foreground the visual, and their position between popular and scholarly forms of communication creates room for including subjective responses. The critical reflexivity of ‘scholarly video essays’ on Chinese television would serve as a useful complement to the vernacular audiovisual ­commentary already prevalent on the Chinese internet. By reconceptualizing the work and proper position of the scholar, videographic criticism can productively challenge the ‘regime of separation’ between researcher and object of study upon which East Asian studies is built.

Keywords:

• Digital humanities
• Chinese television
• research methods
• video essays
• fan criticism

Acknowledgments

The work for this paper was completed when I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities of the University of Hong Kong and I am grateful for the financial and logistical support of the Society. I am also grateful for the feedback I received for my video essay (and on the problems of the video essay as a form) from Linda Lai Chiu-Han, Elizabeth LaCouture, and other participants in the workshop I organized in December 2022. I am thankful to Zhang Xinyue for guiding me through audiovisual criticism on Bilibili; many of the insights into the aesthetics and functions of these videos came out of discussions with Zhang and Norah Chow Chung Yan. Katherine Morrow provided helpful suggestions, as did the anonymous peer reviewers. Finally, I am grateful to Panpan Yang for accepting my proposal for the digital humanities special issue and ushering this paper into publication.

Disclosure of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ted Underwood, for example, decries the “conflation” within both popular and academic accounts of the digital humanities that treat ‘all quantitative or empirical approaches to literary history as aspects of a digital turn in the discipline’ (Underwood 2017, 1–2). As an example of popular misunderstandings of the scope of the digital humanities, he cites Kathyrn Schulz’s New York Times review of Franco Moretti’s work, in which she writes ‘As its name suggests, the Lit Lab tackles literary problems by scientific means: hypothesis-testing, computational modeling, quantitative analysis. Similar efforts are currently proliferating under the broad rubric of “digital humanities”’(Schulz 2011).

2 For a discussion focused on how videographic criticism fits into the digital humanities, see Mittell (2019b).

3 The version of the essay I presented at my workshop in 2022 can be found here: https://youtu.be/A_8X5ccYQ5A (Suher 2022). As I note above, it is very much a work in progress, and I request that anyone who wants to share this essay, assign it to their class, or screen it publicly first ask for my express permission.

4 For some significant recent studies of Chinese television not mentioned in this paper, see Gorfinkel (2018); Kong (2014); Keane (2015); Lewis et al. (2016); Lin (2022); Neves (2020); Wen (2020); and Zhao (2023).

5 Among scholars who write about Chinese television, Joshua Neves does focus on the environments (outdoor screens, subway commutes) in which Chinese television is viewed. See Neves (2020) and Neves (2015).

6 The question of the legality of these videos would need to be the subject of another paper. On one hand, unlike Anglo-American copyright, Chinese copyright law draws from a continental droit d’auteur tradition that accords broader rights to the creator of a work (Sun and Zhang 2018, 66–67). In 2019, the Beijing Internet Court found the makers of a “Graph Movie” (tujie dianying) app, which allowed users to produce recaps of television series using images from the original works, liable for copyright infringement because, regardless of how much copyrighted material was used and how much original text might be added, the remixes hurt the value of the copyrighted material by giving the viewer an alternative method for consuming the work. (Yuan 2019). On the other hand, Article 24 of the People’s Republic of China Droit d’Auteur Law allows for the use of copyrighted material for educational purposes or ‘to introduce, critique a certain work, or illustrate a certain problem’ (Zhonghua renmin gongheguo 2020) and the recap videos of Muyushuixin and Dianying Zui TOP not only remain readily available on Bilibili, they are also actively promoted by the platform through the annual Bilibili Power Up Awards. (Bilibili 2022). For a discussion of the legal issues facing videographic criticism in the US context, see Mittell (2019a).

Additional information

Funding

This work was produced when I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities of the University of Hong Kong, and the Society provided financial support.

Notes on contributors

Dylan Suher

Dylan Suher is a contract lecturer at McGill University. His book project, ‘‘Getting Electrocuted’: Media and the Reconfiguration of Postsocialist Chinese Literature’, investigates how writers in the People’s Republic of China, from the late 1980s to the present day, have articulated problems of creative labor as problems of media and used media technologies to reconfigure the relationship between writers, institutions, and readers. His articles and reviews have been published in Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and Screen.