Looking at China from Abroad: intermediality as a tool for documentary

In 2020, due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, travel to China and around the world was mostly suspended. In the face of such restrictions, the ‘Looking China Youth Film Project’ took a different approach by inviting students from around the world to make documentary short films in remote mode. This meant employing different expressive resources and a mixed-media format, including techniques such as animation, graphics, typography, photographs, and paintings. The aim of this article is to shed light on this pioneering initiative from the point of view of the relationship between intermediality and forms and functions of the documentary genre. It opens with a discussion around the question of intermediality in the audiovisual media, considering how a realist impulse coexists in the cinema with its mixed-media nature, thus bringing together Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image and his case for cinema as an impure form of art. This is followed by a discussion about the recent field of the ‘animated documentary’, both as a practice and as a theoretical debate, which faces the apparent incongruity between film’s unique ability to record reality – which gave rise to the documentary genre, and animation’s creation of a world without any referent in reality. Finally, it considers the experience of the Looking China Youth Film Programme in 2020, with a special emphasis on six documentary films made from a mixture of live images, animation sequences, graphics and screens. The examples analysed allow me to delve into different aspects of the research on cinema and intermediality, including the animated documentary, the influence of the internet in audiovisual media, and the possibilities of a remote practice of film production.