Nowadays Cinematic experience in displaced conditions, the spectacle of cinema is also easily accessible in other contexts, such as TV series, VR games, and the burgeoning online video platform YouTube. But to satisfy the cinematic experience, Casetti (2015) says that seven elements are needed to achieve cinema assemblage: film, spectatorial practices, environment, symbolic instances, spectators and technology.

But to satisfy the cinematic experience, Casetti (2015) says that the cinema assemblage needs to reach through seven aspects: film, spectatorial practices, environment, symbolic instances, spectators and technology. These elements are not static and can continue to evolve with technology and the times.

Cinema is an audiovisual assemblage, but today it can also be catered for by other forms or platforms. Even YouTube has become more sophisticated in its content and functionality. As everyone starts uploading their own videos, the cinematic experience becomes an everyday act.

YouTube as assemblage and media ecology allows everyone to be a creator and everyone to watch more of the world as it is lived, even with the processing and resetting of all kinds of the earlier media material. The vast amount of audiovisual media that floods people’s lives are also a way of finding the high points of audiovisual information in people’s minds in a way that is more specific than the ‘classic clips’ in films. It can be as specific as a familiar generation memory, a collection of messages from a niche, or even a simple clip – a repetition – that can make people feel happy.

Chinese YouTuber Liziqi (who has been off the air for a year and is still ranked number one) shows her life in the Chinese countryside with her grandmother, with her videos focusing on crafts and food, which are often locally sourced from the land she farms herself. The most common theme is “the life of an ingredient”, from planting seeds to rooting and blossoming to cooking an ingredient in multiple ways to make a dinner based on it.

Liziqi’s video, which presents a poetic view of Chinese village life that the general public is unaware of, has gained a huge audience on YouTube. Instead of the usual audio commentary, most of the sound comes from ambient sounds, from the chirping of insects and birds in the mountains to the sound of picking fruits and plants rubbing together, to the natural sounds of working and cooking, to the occasional daily conversation with the grandmother’s dialect, and otherwise to the quiet elegance of soft music. The video also shows a great deal of nature in the mountain village setting, with many time-lapse shots of sunrises and sunsets, stars, clouds and rain, and even time-lapse shots of plants growing. These exquisitely detailed images are realistic yet create the poet-like life she lives.

Reference：

Casetti, Francesco (2105), “Assemblage” in: The Lumière  Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come, New York:  Columbia University Press, 60-82.

Lianfei Zeng

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