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The great bronze statue of a winged lion perched atop one of two granite columns in Venice’s St Mark’s Square has watched over the city for centuries.

But Italian scientists have now found evidence to suggest the iconic statue was at least in part made in China, and possibly ended up in Venice via the Silk Road after being brought back by the father and uncle of the merchant and explorer Marco Polo.

In research due to be published in the journal Antiquity, scientists from the University of Padua found that the copper ore used to cast the Venetian winged lion was mined in China’s Yangtze River basin.

Advanced lead isotope analysis on samples of the lion showed that the copper used in its production originated from the lower Yangtze area in south-eastern China. “Lead isotopes provide a reliable means to link metals to their original ore deposits,” the scientists wrote.

The research also suggests that the lion shares similarities with the kind of statue that might have guarded a tomb during the Tang Empire, which ruled China from AD 618 to 907.

The scientists suggested the whole statue could have been brought to Venice after being encountered by Niccolò and Maffeo Polo during their visit to the Mongol court in Khanbaliq, now Beijing. Once in Venice, it was probably then modified to resemble the Republic’s emblem – the winged lion of St Mark.

A visual examination of the statue showed that it used to have horns, which meant it most closely resembled a zhènmùshòu, a guardian lion that warded off evil spirits from graves during the Tang dynasty. It is believed the horns were later removed and ears shortened to adapt it more to the lion of Saint Mark.

The symbol is omnipresent in Venice, featuring on buildings and coins. It is also the emblem of the Venice film festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion.

However, little is known of the statue’s history. “We don’t know when the sculpture arrived in Venice, where it was reworked, who did it, or when it was erected on the column where it is still visible today,” said the study’s co-author Massimo Vidale. The scientists said their study did show the geographical reach of the Venetian Republic, one of the great trading powers of medieval Europe, and the interconnectedness of its world.

Scholars have previously suggested that the sculpture hailed from Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), ancient Persia or ancient Greece.

“Venice is a city full of mysteries, but one has been solved: the Lion of Saint Mark is Chinese, and he walked the Silk Road,” Vidale said.

As the curtain rises on Pietro Marcello’s handsome but very culturally specific biopic, the legendary Italian actress Eleonora Duse has been in retirement since 1909. Such is her enduring fame that she still draws a crowd when entertaining the troops during the First World War, and the film’s star, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, rises to that challenge, playing her as a grouchy kind of 19^th-century Italian Meryl Streep. Audiences in the know will appreciate the effortless gravitas she brings to the role, but, while it’s certainly no Mommie Dearest, there’s also perhaps unintentional streak of camp that creeps in later, when Duse’s parenting skills turn out to make her more like Joan Crawford.

We meet Duse when she has withdrawn from the stage so vehemently that she’s almost forgotten who she is (“I don’t even know if I’m still an actress,” she sighs). On top of that, she is suffering from tuberculosis and in no fit state to make a comeback; indeed, her Austrian assistant is trying to persuade her to visit a sanatorium in Davos and chill the hell out. But even if she wanted to go, Duse can’t — the Bank of Berlin has collapsed, taking all her savings with it. The shock of that, plus the seriousness of the T.B., almost kills her, but she awakens from a brief coma with a new passion for life (“I felt death brush past me”).

Duse’s immediate response is to return to the stage and the world of Henrik Ibsen, one of her favorite writers. “The Lady From the Sea has returned!” she enthuses and immediately assembles a production of Ibsen’s play of the same name, in which she plays Ellida, the heroine. The prep is quite intense, resulting one of the best rehearsing-a-scene sequences since Mulholland Drive (itself inspired by Sunset Boulevard). But when opening night comes round, Duse realizes that her daughter will be in the audience. “I can’t do Ellida in front of my daughter,” she gasps, very theatrically, leaving her assistant to do the dirty work and banish the poor woman (and her two kids) from the building.

The play is a hit, of sorts, or so Duse thinks. Afterwards, the legendary Sarah Bernhardt stops by her celebratory dinner, but not to offer her congratulations. It was like “a museum where time has stopped,” she notes, citing the recent conflict. “Love changed, dreams changed. Everything changed after this war.” Bernhardt’s harsh words are a wake-up call, so she bankrolls a pretentious play called Hecuba of the Trenches, an avant-garde production that looks like a Ken Russell dream sequence and results in the audience showering the stage in fruit and veg — which we all take to the theater, just in case — shouting, “We want the classics!”

Throwing the playwright under the bus, Duse becomes obsessed with her dream of creating “a temple for the theater” and returns to one of her other favorite writers: Gabriele D’Annunzio, who has emerged from the war as a hero and, while he disavows the rise of fascist leader Benito Mussolini, his nationalist views don’t exactly rock the boat with Mussolini and his Blackshirt bully boys. Though Duse will die before the Second World War, when Il Duce finally showed his true colors on the world stage, she ignores the almost Day-Glo red flags that surround him and falls into his “butterfly net”, much to the horror of her acolytes (to say much more than that would rob the film of its few, very low-key surprises).

Built around an all-in performance by Tedeschi, who repeatedly seems on the brink of going full Nicolas Cage but always pulls back at the last moment, Duse is an enjoyable but somewhat opaque take on an enigmatic Italian legend. It’s fine for the actor to play her myriad contradictions, but for those unfamiliar with Duse’s story it’s hard to know what Marcello is trying to say about her. Was she vain? Was she deluded? Or was she a genuine genius, a century ahead of her time? Thankfully, Tedeschi is a powerhouse in that respect — maybe she’s all three. In the long run, though, Duse is mostly a stylish stream of scenes from a life, however fabulously and strangely that life was lived.

Title: Duse
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Director: Pietro Marcello
Screenwriters: Letizia Russo, Guido Silei, Pietro Marcello
Cast: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Fanni Wrochna, Noémie Merlant, Fausto Russo Alesi, Edoardo Sorgente, Vincenzo Nemolato, Noémie Lvovsky
Sales agent: The Match Factory
Running time: 2 hrs 5 mins

Thirty eight million people and counting have watched Hbomberguy’s near four-hour video Plagiarism and You(Tube), in which the YouTuber – real name Harry Brewis – forensically dissects intellectual theft across the platform in a work of investigative journalism worthy of a Pulitzer. To put that into perspective, 32 million people in the UK tuned in to watch Princess Diana’s funeral broadcast live on the BBC. If you’re not familiar with the work, video essays may just be the biggest cultural phenomenon you’ve never heard of.

Early versions of video essays – thoughtful deep dives that filter cultural analysis through the distinct personality of the creator – emerged in the early 2000s, but it was the converging currents of the “online left” and the creativity that flourished under lockdowns that saw the number of creators rise and the format swell in popularity. For the past eight years, the British Film Institute has put out a yearly ranking of video essays of the year. BBC auteur Adam Curtis has said if he were starting out again, he would become a YouTuber, calling it “the last wild west” of online creativity.

Prevailing common sense in the boardrooms of streaming services and broadcasting corporations is that attention, both in terms of quality and quantity, is dwindling. Research from the psychologist Gloria Mark has shown that attention times are declining, now averaging 47 seconds on a given task while using an electronic device. This creates an issue for the commissioning of factual entertainment, which by its nature requires viewers to engage with ideas. To get round this problem, streaming services have turned to easily digestible output – reality TV, nature documentaries or grisly true-crime miniseries. Public service broadcasters such as the BBC, whose mission is to “inform, educate and entertain”, have mimicked streamers, not wanting to be left behind.

On smaller phone screens, TikTok and Instagram Reels range between 30 seconds and 10 minutes. The bold, the catchy and, in some cases, the extreme, travel far. Other platforms, such as Facebook or X, where ideas might once have been exchanged and discussed in good faith have become wastelands of misinformation, posturing, hot takes and conflict.

In contrast, video essays are thought-provoking, nuanced and self-reflexive. They mix philosophical theory, cultural studies and internet subcultures. Even if a streaming service wanted to, they wouldn’t be able to generate a tag for this type of content. The couple behind Leftist Cooks, former academic Sarah Oeffler and creative Neilly Farrell, are emblematic of the mixture of education and entertainment. Their video When Your Hero Is a Monster inspired by the unsavoury allegations against Neil Gaiman, went viral at the end of last year; it sees them literally donning a number of different hats in order to represent the struggle many have in reconciling their attachments to cancelled celebrities.

“We’ll be talking about Foucault or something and then, yeah, it’s like: Oh, there’s that episode of BoJack Horseman that does that,” says Oeffler.

Video essays can also be very, very long. The final product takes months, and in some cases, years worth of research, writing, planning, costume and set designing, filming and editing. ContraPoints’ magisterial 2hr 40min video Conspiracy, about the allure of this thinking and its impact on democracy, has no fewer than six costume changes, including one Eyes Wide Shut-inspired scene with eight different Venetian masks. In another scene, the channel’s creator, Natalie Wynn, “built this giant trope of a conspiracy wall with yarn … a week was spent making hundreds of photo prints … I went through three canisters of ink printing out declassified CIA documents and pinning them all over the wall. It’s probably eight feet.”

José María Luna’s latest essay, Searching for God in Film, explores faith through cinema by referencing 50 films, including The Seventh Seal and The Sound of Music. It also features the creator dressed as St Sebastian (arrows and all), a cardinal and a layperson confessing his sins. When mood-boarding the essay, he thought: “‘What if I fake a confessional [booth]?’ So I faked [it] with some black poster board and the back of my bed in my bedroom, which was very fun.”

By the metrics of bigger organisations, video essays shouldn’t work, and yet they do. In fact, these videos are mainly watched on larger TV screens, much like regular movies or shows. Canadian documentarian Dan Olsen, also known as Folding Ideas, has covered topics as wide-ranging as media criticism and online conspiracy and finance culture. He believes that YouTubers have reached a point of maturation where they are able to make ambitious, educational, entertaining content on a par with previous broadcast educators such as Carl Sagan, who popularised astronomy in the 1980s with his landmark documentaries. He believes that video essayists are a “filling a hole in documentary production, in educational content, in science communication, at a wide swath of budget and production levels that I think people are thirsty for and [that] broadcast TV has been unable or unwilling to fill for a very long time.” Line Goes Up, his definitive and acerbic two-hour breakdown and takedown of cryptocurrencies and NFTs, through direct to camera monologue, graphics, images, and screen recordings has more than 17m views.

The first creator to make videos in 2004 specifically for an internet audience was James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd, who posted scrappy gaming reviews and skits in character. This was followed by Channel Awesome posting comedic film reviews. After leaving the channel, creator Lindsay Ellis would go on to be one of the original YouTube essayists, posting long-form critiques of animation and fantasy films, among other things.

The political strand of video essays emerged between 2014 and 2016 as progressive creators found themselves sharing YouTube with the emerging “alt-right”. Things came to a head over GamerGate, a misogynistic online harassment campaign against women in the gaming industry. Hbomberguy’s first video was the The Sarkeesian Effect: A Measured Response, mocking the men who were taking aim at the woman at the centre of the outrage. The term “Bread Tube” (a reference to anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin’s book, The Conquest of Bread) was coined to describe a loose collection of creators, including the above as well as other channels such as Philosophy Tube, though many creators rejected it.

The videos are in no small part successful because they represent political points of view, identities and creators – including trans people, queer people and people of colour – who have been marginalised by the mainstream. “People who are traditionally excluded from more formal publishing opportunities can have a voice on YouTube,” says Wynn. “And often there is an audience that is not being catered to elsewhere that does exist and is there on YouTube. There were creators and there was an audience. They were not being connected with each other until the gatekeeping was eliminated.”

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Over time, the format expanded to encompass theoretical perspectives on culture (and vice versa – culture was used to explain theory). Wynn’s Twilight video, in which she sits at an overflowing banquet table replete with candelabras and skulls, uses feminist and queer theory to explore themes of sex, sexuality, desire and power dynamics between genders as evoked in Stephenie Meyer’s vampire novels.

Fashion and lifestyle trends have also become a subject for creators such as Mina Le. Her first video was about the historical accuracy of the costume design in the film Atonement. “It’s OK to think seriously about things that are otherwise considered mundane or irrelevant,” says Zandile Powell, AKA Kidology, who documents in real-time the excesses and extremities of internet culture.

“This corner of the internet is a surprisingly pleasant place to be,” says Oeffler. “There’s genuinely a bunch of solidarity between creators. We try to boost people all the time, we recommend people to our audience who might not natively get as many views. We know based on research that people are less likely to click on the thumbnail of somebody if they’re Black, for example.” Although the parasocial relationship between creators and audiences, combined with the high standards of the left, has meant that audiences have at times pushed back against creators for not being radical enough.

What next? “Right now we are in a golden age because there are a lot of channels that are able to access business-level budgets,” says Olsen. Thanks to Patreon, the most popular creators are able to hire teams and/or work full-time on their videos – although many smaller YouTubers rely on revenue made from hosting adverts in their videos, making them vulnerable to brands pulling advertising budgets as they did during the pandemic. Some video essayists are already moving away from YouTube to the creator-owned platform Nebula.

For now, things are exciting. When I ask José María Luna what video essay concepts he is working on next, he pulls out his phone: “I have a Notes app full of ideas like ‘Donald Duck and cultural imperialism’ or ‘Musicals and mental illness’. I don’t even know what I meant by that.”