# Relational Image Theory

He Fa

# Before We Begin

When I photograph someone, I am often also making a request. I ask them to stay, face the camera, say it again, or become someone else for a while. How they answer, and what I do with that answer, will affect what happens next. The camera records the answer, but it is already part of the request.

This is where this book begins.

P4 is where I have continued to work with photography, theater, and moving images. Shoot Self with You brings rehearsal, performance, and the process of working together into a film. Its participants perform, and they also comment on the performance. Some ask to go on; others want to stop. The title of director falls to different people. What is being performed and what is happening press up against one another. To distinguish them, we need to look more closely than the question ‘Is this real or fake?’ allows.

I am interested in how art changes the conditions under which people meet. A role can enable someone to say something they ordinarily find hard to say. A shared task can bring strangers into one another’s company. A piece of cloth can turn leaving into an action everyone can see. These arrangements do have uses. They allow certain things to happen, but they cannot determine what those things mean to each person.

This is also where the questions become difficult. If I have given my time to an encounter and arranged a form for it, does that give me more reason to expect the answer I want? If I have kept an image of someone, do I understand them better than other people do? If an experience finally becomes a film, does that prove that everything that happened was worthwhile?

These questions concern my own work first. It is easy for an artist to put their wishes into someone else’s task, then take the completion of that task as a response to those wishes. What filming leaves behind may be less than that, or something quite different.

In this book, ‘the formation of relations’ names a concrete change: through a shared activity, people gain, lose, or change the positions from which they can act. Someone who could only answer begins to ask questions. Someone who was carrying out a task begins to revise it. Someone being watched asks the person watching to explain themselves. The changes are sometimes small, yet they can make it impossible for the next step to proceed as before. I am interested in how these changes happen, and how framing, sound, and editing turn them into a film that unfamiliar viewers can understand.

Writing about relations therefore also means writing about form. The complexity of an event cannot defend a film on its behalf. Viewers were not at the rehearsal, do not know everyone involved, and do not owe the filmmaker as much time as the event itself took. Whatever the film wants them to see, it must do the work of making that visible.

I hope this book can retain both demands: to make clear judgments about a work, while leaving the people in it room to go on living. The openness of a person’s life cannot excuse loose form; nor should a finished form be used to declare a person complete.

The nine chapters that follow begin with photographs. First, I look at how someone enters the frame, then at how roles and tasks bring people together, and finally at how these experiences are edited into a film. There is no need to accept a set of terms in advance. The judgments in this book should be legible in the photographs, words, bodies, and objects themselves.


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# Chapter 1 · Starting with a Photograph

In 2023, I wrote: ‘When I raise the camera, the subject is afraid, and so am I.’[1-1]

I studied photography, yet for a long time I pointed my camera at landscapes and streets. Facing a person changed things. As soon as I raised the camera, they began to consider how they would appear, and I began to feel the weight of their expectations for the photograph. Before I had pressed the shutter, being photographed had already changed both of us.

At the time, I described this difficulty as being unable to photograph the real person. I felt there was always a layer of posing in front of the lens, blocking what I wanted to see. Reading those words again, I also recognize the photographer’s presumption: because I wanted the other person to be natural, I treated their nervousness in front of the camera as a disguise. I wanted to get close to them, yet I had already decided what they had to look like to count as themselves.

Why must a person be natural in front of me?

When I raise the camera, they have reasons to be nervous, to choose their clothes, and to withhold a particular expression from me. If a photograph is allowed to preserve only the truth its photographer approves of, then taking photographs remains a job of asking others to conform to me. P4 began with this difficulty. What we wanted to do gradually extended beyond taking a good photograph of someone.

## The Room Is Part of the Camera Too

Zhang Shaohua was my university classmate. After graduating, he worked as an independent photographer, while I went into a 3D-printing venture. When we began talking about photography again, neither of us was satisfied with what we were doing. He complained that models stiffened in front of the lens, then asked to be retouched to look especially beautiful. We began to try out a method of photography that we called ‘a performance of not performing.’[1-2]

There was a contradiction in that phrase. If we were asking someone not to perform, why organize a shoot? If being natural was already possible, why talk, prepare a space, or arrange lights? Our practice was already ahead of our explanation. How the photographer spoke, what the two people had discussed beforehand, and how the room allowed someone to sit down or stand up all affected the photograph. Looking only at the subject’s face could mean missing the conditions that allowed that face to appear.

In 2015, work began on turning a studio in Tiantongyuan into P4. Shaohua took charge of moving the design and construction forward. During our discussions about the space, Ao Shuang proposed making it a theater. I designed the visual identity. Several of us made this place together. Half of it was a black stage; the other half was a white work area and audience seating. On entering the stage, the black velvet curtains closed around you, hiding the edges of the original room.[1-2]

I later came to think of it as an enormous camera, with people entering the space between its light and dark chambers. The value of this image was that it pushed the scope of photography a little further outward. A photograph is, of course, formed through light and photosensitive material. But taking it also depends on a room that can hold two people, and on their willingness to remain there. A photographer cannot declare themselves absent just because they are outside the frame. Each time they say ‘Relax a little,’ they give the other person one more thing to deal with at that moment.

A black space does not automatically make people free, either. It can reduce distractions from the surroundings, but it can also intensify the feeling of being watched. Light illuminates the body, and may also make someone more conscious of the parts of themselves they find unattractive. The space gave us conditions in which to work. What happened next still had to be done by people.

## The Moment Nervousness Returns

Xiao Xiang took part in Shixiang in 2020 and later wrote about her experience. On the day of the shoot, she tried on her clothes again and again, looking for an outfit that felt most like her, but none seemed right. When she entered P4, the photographer poured her some water and explained the process. As they talked, she was still assessing whether her answers were interesting and how the photographer would see her. Only as she gradually began to speak about that day’s worries, her hopes for the shoot, and her past experiences did she grow calmer.[1-3]

She then entered the black stage. A photographic light stood in the middle; a rose lay on a small table to the left. She wrote that the moment she stood before the camera, her worry, nervousness, and expectations for the photographs all returned. Her muscles tightened too.

I want to pause here. The earlier conversation had not been wasted, and her nervousness before the lens was not false. Both states occurred in the same person. To describe the experience as taking off a mask and finally finding her true self would erase its most concrete change: a person who had just been able to talk was now worrying again about how she looked. The demands she faced had changed.

In her account, the photographer asked her to close her eyes, adjust her breathing, and return her attention to her body. He played recordings of natural environments, then guided her through imagined scenes. She began to ask herself why she needed to look beautiful, whom the shoot was for, and whether she could face an imperfect version of herself. She did not find every answer, but felt able to accept the emotions that were emerging. She opened her eyes. The shutter sounded.

At the end, she wrote that she was no longer worried about how the photographs would turn out, because they were ‘a record and proof of this process.’[1-3]

This sentence changes what is being judged. A photograph can look beautiful, and it can also remind someone of how they came to stand before the camera. The second use does not cancel the first, but adds another layer of meaning to the photograph. She had begun to bring what happened during the shoot into her judgment of its images.

I cannot extend that moment into a permanent change on her behalf, nor do I want to treat her experience as a result everyone ought to obtain. Her willingness to write about it already offers a concrete answer: a shoot can change the criteria by which we judge images of ourselves. To understand that change, we have to allow nervousness to return and questions to remain unanswered.

## Bringing the Photograph Back

In 2020, we called our new Shixiang plan ‘Eight and a Half.’ Odd-numbered sessions centered on taking photographs; even-numbered sessions centered on looking and expressing oneself. We left time between each meeting.[1-2]

This arrangement placed the photograph between two meetings. What had been photographed on the first occasion had to be faced again on the second. A participant might discover that they liked a particular picture, or fail to recognize themselves in the one the photographer thought best. What they were willing to say last time might be something they no longer wanted to say today. A detail that mattered today might have gone unnoticed before. A photograph preserves one appearance, but cannot guarantee that a person will always understand it in the same way.

Alternating between taking and viewing photographs allowed this difference to enter the next stage of work. The photographer could no longer simply hand over the finished product and wait to be told it was satisfactory. The subject, too, had a chance to say how the image corresponded to their experience and where it missed the mark. The photograph remained a photograph, and the shoot that had already happened could not be rewritten. But the next encounter could begin somewhere different.

The ‘formation of relations’ that interests me is, first of all, something this simple: the result of an earlier action changes the conditions of the next one. A photograph has not said everything there is to say about this person. Nor can a photographer decide, on the strength of a single shoot, that they have understood them.

This also asks more of the photograph. The process may have been precious, while the resulting images remain thin. Two people may have enjoyed their time together and still produced only a familiar pose. An image needs its own organization: how the body and space relate, where a posture is held, and what differences between several photographs make them irreplaceable by one another. The participant’s appreciation of the process cannot do this work for the photographer.

Conversely, a powerful photograph cannot prove that the process of making it benefited the person involved. The photograph and the experience are connected, but each still has its own questions to answer.

## Leaving Room to Appear Again

In my early writing, I repeatedly spoke of the ‘true self’ and of ‘performing for and watching one another.’ These two wishes were always entangled. On the one hand, I hoped to photograph someone who had not yet been seen. On the other, the encounter itself changed the person. Rewriting this history does not require me to invent a straight line of progress for my younger self.

I still care whether the person is present in the photograph. Some images cover them with a beautiful, generic face. Some explanations attribute everything they do to their surroundings. Both make the particular person disappear. People bring their memories, habits, likes, dislikes, and judgments. A shoot brings these things into contact with the demands before them. They can agree, hesitate, or say, ‘That photograph doesn’t look like me.’ Their response can put the photographer’s original idea in difficulty.

That difficulty is worth keeping. It makes taking a photograph something two people do, rather than one person proving the depth of their own insight.

P4 later moved from photography involving two people to rehearsals with more participants. Speaking, watching, performing, and recording crossed paths in the same space. Who made demands, and who was asked to perform, began to change continually. We still wanted images to come from this, but what those images had to face now exceeded a single person’s face: how a request reached another person, what answer it received, and how that changed the next step.

I want strangers to enter my work through these small actions. First, look at how two people come to stand before a camera; then ask what happened between them. Truth can begin to be tested here.

## Sources

[1-1] He Fa, [‘The Story of Shoot Self with You—Will the Aliens Return?’](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2023/2023-08-18-艺术公演-人类投降派-始末-外星人还会再次降临吗-76791e9eb6/), 18 August 2023. The opening account of his experience with photography and the production remarks at the end.

[1-2] He Fa, [‘What Is Shixiang?’](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2020/2020-06-21-何为实像-bdbdd4669a/), 21 June 2020. Passages including ‘The Painted-Over Virtual Image,’ ‘P4 Theater: A Large Black Box,’ and ‘Shixiang: Eight and a Half.’ The account of the space’s construction and the early practice follows the author’s retrospective account at the time. Eight and a Half is discussed in this chapter as a proposed method.

[1-3] Xiao Xiang (Evelyne), [‘Participant No. 0039: A Personal Experience of Shixiang’](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2020/2020-06-25-0039号体验者-实像-个人体验-988c03b446/), 25 June 2020. ‘Before the Shoot,’ ‘Step One: How to Present Myself?,’ ‘Step Two: An Encounter and Exchange with the Subconscious,’ and the conclusion. This remains her personal account of a single shoot.


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# Chapter 2 · The Person Who Says “I Love You”

## A Sentence Changes Its Use

At the beginning of Shoot Self with You, Jia Rui says, ‘I love you.’ A little later, Zi Chou says, ‘The acting is terrible.’[2-1]

Between the two sentences, the listener shifts from one role to another. The first offers a declaration of love; the second looks back to assess that expression. Someone who was just reaching toward another person has become a performer being watched. He has finished speaking, yet what his words amount to has become a question again.

I do not want to find proof of a feeling hidden beneath the lines of this declaration. Discovering the actors’ private feelings would not make the scene easier to understand. What deserves attention is that two demands fall on the same person at once: he needs to speak to his partner, and he needs to make his speaking worth watching. The other person can receive what he expresses, or step outside it and judge his performance. Acting thus carries an asymmetry: I am still speaking to you, while you are already watching how I speak.

This shift also means that what is ‘real’ in a film cannot be measured by intensity of commitment alone. If an actor cries, the tears really occur; what they express still depends on the action in which they appear. Someone who does not cry may also render a difficult grief precisely. Feelings and the ability to express them do not always arrive at the same moment. Demanding that they coincide completely can keep actors so busy proving what is inside them that they have no time to hear the person beside them.

‘The acting is terrible’ can, of course, be a useful judgment. Without judgments about expression, rehearsal would struggle to continue. But a judgment needs to contain something that can be answered: what was unclear just now, which action came too soon, or who had not yet been given time to respond. If evaluation stays at the level of real or fake, performers can only keep offering themselves up, waiting for someone else to announce that this time they are finally real enough.

I want the film to keep this shift visible. It allows viewers to see how intimate words become work, and how judgments about that work enter the process of people drawing closer. Declarations of love and evaluations each have their uses. When they meet, they can also interrupt one another.

## A Role Gives Someone a Position

A role allows someone to do something with others without first having to explain themselves in full. They can say a line that has already been written, carry out an agreed action, or begin by knowing whom to turn toward. Something difficult to say in ordinary life can sometimes take shape through this distance. Fiction gives action a starting point, and leaves the person a little room to retreat: this sentence is happening within the play, so I can try saying it.

In an article written before the performance, Sun Jiarui describes how acting allowed him to meet people and become their friend, and how it became a way of feeling needed. He also writes about his dislike of himself in photographs, his surprise after agreeing to perform, and his intention to stop acting.[2-2] These parts should be read together. A role gives him a way in, but may also narrow that entrance. Others need this actor, and so he can remain part of their shared life. How else might he be needed once he leaves the actor’s position? That becomes a harder question to answer.

What I see here is a dependence that enthusiasm can easily conceal in creative work. Doing things together produces relations, but those relations may then require a person to keep serving a particular purpose. Someone who is always ready with a reply is expected to keep replying. Someone willing to take on a difficult role is invited to do so again. The ability that first gave them entry gradually becomes the main way others recognize them. The more successful the role, the easier it is for the particular person to be hidden behind it.

This does not mean collaboration should have no division of tasks. It is precisely through different abilities that people can work together. The problem is when a person’s assigned part comes to be understood as all that they are. If someone refuses to perform next time, do they lose a work arrangement, or also their place among the others? ‘We’re all friends’ cannot answer that question in advance. It depends on how people continue to see one another after someone stops serving a function.

I therefore want to think of a role as a place one can enter and also leave. It should allow tentative attempts: speaking with someone else’s sentences and discovering one’s own voice; completing a task and discovering that one no longer wants to do it this way. The relations a role opens up deserve to be tested beyond that role.

## Knowing It Is Acting, Still Wanting to Argue Back

After the performance, Sun Jiarui wrote: ‘I know He Fa is acting, but I really do want to argue back.’[2-3]

This sentence makes the effect of performance precise. He recognizes it as acting, yet the wish to argue back still arises. Knowing that something belongs to a play does not exempt him from its effects. An actor can know perfectly well that the other person is speaking lines and still be angered or moved by what they say, or feel that an arrangement ought to change. Fiction has real effects precisely because the people taking part in it have not left reality: they are still spending time, waiting for one another, judging the action before them, and carrying it out with their own bodies.

Yet we cannot gather all these effects under the phrase ‘getting into character.’ Getting into character is often understood as forgetting oneself, as if actors can only feel something real by temporarily losing the ability to distinguish what is happening. Jia Rui’s words retain that distinction. He knows he is performing, and he has his own judgment. The urge to argue back coexists with his awareness of the play. A person can participate in a framework while also judging it from within.

This is part of what makes fiction interesting. It lets someone borrow another situation while retaining some distance from it. A person can try actions they would not ordinarily take and discover their limits in the attempt. Complete immersion is only one state of performance. Remaining aware, hesitating, or occasionally stepping out of a role can also produce powerful expression. A film can bring these different states together, allowing a character’s actions and an actor’s judgments to illuminate one another.

Someone may ask: if real relations matter, why not simply talk directly? Because ‘directly’ has conditions of its own. The names we call one another, our habits, and our expectations in ordinary life already determine much of who can say what and how far they can go. Taking on another role can sometimes move those arrangements a little. People do not always have a complete self first and then search for the right sentences to convey it. Sometimes only after speaking and acting do they discover that this is how they respond.

I value this discovery, but do not want to possess it. A maker can arrange a task that allows a sentence to be spoken. What that sentence later means to the speaker is something the speaker must go on understanding. The work preserves the expression, while the person’s interpretation continues to change.

## No Single Kind of Truth Can Answer Everything

At this point, several things that easily become entangled need to be separated. Whether a line was actually spoken is something a recording can help establish. To understand what someone felt while speaking, we need to hear their account. Whether that expression changed how people related to one another requires looking at what they did next. Whether the film gave these changes a forceful organization takes us back to its sounds, images, and rhythms.

All four questions matter. When they are mixed together, a work can acquire a value from the weight of lived experience that seems to need no further explanation: someone was really distressed, so this passage must remain; the collaboration was unforgettable, so viewers ought to be moved. But viewers did not share those days. They are facing a film and need to establish a relation to it through what it gives them. A pause familiar to its makers may still be a blank for a stranger. Turning that blank into a waiting the viewer can feel is work the film’s form has to do.

Conversely, a moving film does not prescribe how the people involved should remember what happened. Artistic success cannot account for every value of an encounter. Someone may cherish the film while remaining unhappy with a particular arrangement. Someone else may have no interest in the finished film yet cherish an afternoon of working together. These differences should be allowed to remain around the work.

My position is therefore clear: art can actively create the conditions under which people meet. It need not wait for an entirely authentic life to appear of its own accord. Roles, sets, lines, and cameras can all give experience ways of being expressed that it did not have before. Art’s strength also comes from a limit: participants can always bring something that the arrangement has not yet included.

When someone says ‘I love you,’ they borrow a sentence countless people have spoken, yet still address it, at this moment, to a particular person. The listener may answer, hesitate, or judge the performance. Where the next sentence takes this relation cannot be determined by the first sentence alone. The film’s work begins here: to preserve how a reply is awaited, missed, or changed.

## Sources

[2-1] Historical, manually confirmed dialogue ledger for Shoot Self with You, 6 May 2026; opening-scene navigation points 00:04:45.700 and 00:04:53.566. The Chinese wording and speaker attributions follow the manually confirmed fields. Earlier manuscript: Chapter 1, section 1.1; Chapter 8, section 8.1; and Chapter 14. This passage examines how words are used, without inferring the actors’ private relationships.

[2-2] Sun Jiarui, [‘This Is the Last Rehearsal! It’s Real! It’s All Real!’](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2023/2023-08-19-人类投降派-这是最后的排演-是真的-都是真的-0f7426ff2d/), 19 August 2023.

[2-3] Sun Jiarui, [‘I Disappeared—After Performing The Last Rehearsal’](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2023/2023-09-02-人类投降派-我消失了-在演完-最后的排练-之后-50a18864f8/), 2 September 2023. The quotation is from his account after the performance.


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# Chapter 3 · Once More

## The Last Attempt Remains in the Body

“Once more” is one of the most ordinary things said in rehearsal, and perhaps one of the hardest requests to understand. What are we repeating? A sequence of movements, a line, a feeling that has already gone, or an approach that failed to begin just now? The person saying it may think the meaning is clear, but the person doing it has to decide what to carry into the next attempt.

This suggestion also appears in Shoot Self with You.[3-1] I want to pause first over the word “again.” It points to the past but calls for a future action. The next attempt will not begin from nothing: the participants have already heard feedback, know that a particular action has failed, and may have become more familiar with their partners, or may already be tired. Repetition always carries something left by the previous attempt. Even when the lines and positions are exactly the same, what people have to deal with may have changed.

Starting again can therefore both correct and accumulate. A sequence that initially required thought can later be completed smoothly; an answer that could be tried at first may no longer appear because it has already been rejected. Repetition brings proficiency, and it also brings expectations. People gradually learn what will be accepted. That knowledge can help them work together, but it can also make them deliver the right answer before the other person has finished speaking.

I do not place contingency in opposition to proficiency. If a partner unexpectedly changes speed, someone practised may have more room to respond; someone entirely unprepared may only be able to fall back on the actions they first memorized. What matters is what capacities practice has freed up, and what attention it has taken over. Once an action can be performed reliably, can the person still hear the difference between this attempt and the last?

Sameness then has two uses. It can let people retreat into a result they already know, or provide a stable place from which small changes can finally be noticed. If everything changes on every attempt, change becomes harder to distinguish. Keeping some things in place makes it possible to see how others move. Freedom in creative work sometimes needs such fixed points.

## What Counts as Finished?

A request that can be carried out can usually also specify when it has been fulfilled. Wait for the other person to finish before beginning your own line; walk to a particular place and pause; make a word audible to the back row. The actor can try, the director can explain, and the next attempt can be compared with the last. They may not agree quickly, but their disagreement has an object they can work on together.

“Make it more real” may move that object out of reach. The actor has completed the action but must also prove that they are present in it; if they explain that they feel something, they may then be judged too deliberate. The more authenticity is demanded, the more the actor needs to watch how they appear. They try to enter the scene while checking from the outside whether they have entered it. A command to be natural can make people work ever harder to manage their naturalness.

Gentleness and severity cannot distinguish good rehearsal here. A precise request can be demanding and frustrating, while broad encouragement may never give anyone something they can actually do. The artist should take on the difficulty of turning judgment into work. If an attempt lacks force, where exactly does it fall short? Are the actions unrelated, the words addressed to no one, or does the rhythm leave no time for a response? A feeling may not be immediately nameable, but the work should still begin with something that can be tried.

I am especially wary of treating commitment as an unlimited resource. What an actor has already expressed may be judged not good enough, but that judgment cannot simply become a judgment of the whole person. It is this attempt that has failed; the person’s entire authenticity should not therefore be put on trial. Rehearsal needs to make room for an attempt that has not gone well, so that the next can be work rather than another act of self-defence.

The strongest objection to this position is that art takes people precisely where no method yet exists. If every request is completely clear, would all that remains be execution? I agree that the unknown cannot be eliminated. A director may not be able to say in advance what they are looking for, but they can work with the actors to identify the differences that emerge in each attempt, and acknowledge that they have not yet found it this time. The question is who bears the unknown. An artist cannot preserve the ambiguity of their own judgment while demanding definite proof of the participants’ inner lives.

Finishing does not always mean reaching an ideal result. Sometimes it means having seen clearly that continuing with this method will bring us no closer to what we are looking for. Only when we can end one method can we begin another.

## Letting the Lines Step Back a Little

In a 2018 interview, Ryusuke Hamaguchi discussed repeated script readings: first, without imposing a fixed tone, the actors read until they have thoroughly absorbed the words; then, during filming, they let their expression respond to the moment and their partners.[3-2] What interests me is the arrangement between these two stages. Repetition takes on part of the work of remembering, so that when filming begins, the actors do not have to devote all their attention to “What is my next line?”

This suggests a limited claim: preparation can change how attention is distributed. When the lines are relatively secure, an actor may notice a partner’s hesitation and adjust the timing of their own entry. The text has not disappeared, but it has receded a little. The person has a chance to respond to what is happening. Listening here includes sound, but also waiting: allowing the other person’s expression on this attempt to arrive a little later, more quietly, or with a pause absent from the last.

This arrangement can also lead to the opposite result. Once actors have memorized the text, they may be even more eager to complete the sequence they already know; what is called natural is merely the precise reproduction of a practised manner. A method’s name does not determine its effect. What needs to be observed is whether, after repetition, actors have more ways to respond to change, or are left only with smoother execution.

There is an actual timeline connecting P4 and Hamaguchi. In a 2023 article, Yun Jianhui recalled that we had already discussed Hamaguchi’s work in 2022; after Shoot Self with You began, the early crew studied Intimacies, and lines from that film entered the script in July of the same year.[3-3] This record shows that the film had become part of our shared work. For me, the question more worth pursuing is how those studies changed the way we worked. There is still a long way between liking a film and making its method work among another group of people.

What I take from repeated script reading does not require every creative work to follow the same procedure. It draws my attention to a question that enthusiasm often obscures: how many things can a person handle at once while expressing themselves? Remembering lines, searching for emotion, attending to the camera, and guessing how pleased the director is can easily fill all one’s attention with one’s own tasks. Entrusting some of this to practice is meant to free up the capacity to attend to other people.

Listening in art therefore needs to be arranged. It can begin by reducing certain tasks, fixing a standing position, or making a sentence clear. Asking someone to open up their whole self is often too much; enabling them to hear the sentence in front of them through to its end is sometimes already difficult.

## Allowing an Attempt to Have No Shape Yet

Another value of repetition is that it allows awkwardness to remain in the work for a while. When an action is new, the body often moves more slowly than the intention. Knowing that one wants to come closer does not mean already knowing how to stand, where to put one’s hands, or how to leave the other person enough support. If a complete action is demanded too soon, participants can easily choose a familiar performance posture that makes the difficulty disappear from the image.

The difficulty may be covered over without the action having been resolved. A familiar way of performing intimacy may conceal how two people actually approach each other; an uneven attempt may instead reveal what needs adjusting. I am willing to give such attempts time. But awkwardness does not thereby acquire an inherent aesthetic value. A pause may contain a search, or it may simply reflect a lack of preparation. Creative work needs to discern whether, after the pause, the relation between the person and the action has changed.

We can imagine a simple comparison: two people repeatedly practise taking the hand the other extends. One way of practising requires the action to match the demonstration every time; another first fixes where the extended hand starts, and lets the person receiving it adjust to its actual speed. The first can train precision, the second responsiveness. Both may be useful, and they may alternate within the same rehearsal. The distinction is concrete enough that proficiency and freedom need not be set against each other.

This also changes how I think about “failed footage.” Whether an attempt is worth including in a film depends on what it changes. If viewers can see how two people adjust and begin to wait for one another, slowness has content of its own. If only embarrassment is shown repeatedly, while the participants gain no new action, extending the viewing may merely increase their exposure. Keeping failure requires a formal reason, just as keeping success does.

Once more cannot cancel the previous attempt. What it can do is bring that attempt into a new action: I did not hear you out just now, so now I wait; I was eager to finish, and now I see that my partner is not ready; I thought it was a question of emotion, and now I hear the other person say it is a little hot. A small condition emerges, and what the next attempt needs to do changes with it.

## Sources

[3-1] Historical, manually confirmed dialogue ledger for Shoot Self with You, 6 May 2026: Ricky, “Can we do it one more time?”, approximately 02:04:41. This earlier timecode is used for navigation. The specific relations in the public scene are left until Chapter 5. The argument about repetition is rewritten from relevant parts of Chapters 5 and 6 of the earlier manuscript.

[3-2] Ryusuke Hamaguchi, interviewed by Jordan Cronk, [“Cannes Interview: Ryusuke Hamaguchi”](https://www.filmcomment.com/interview-ryusuke-hamaguchi/), *Film Comment*, May–June 2018, questions and answers on script reading and filming methods. The subsequent discussion of how attention is distributed is this book’s interpretation, not a verified training effect.

[3-3] Yun Jianhui, [‘Shoot Self with You D | One More Time’](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2023/2023-08-24-人类投降派-D-再来一次-316626b0ea/), 24 August 2023. The timeline is his retrospective account from that period; it does not establish that P4 adopted Hamaguchi’s rehearsal procedure in full.


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# Chapter 4 · The Body Sets Conditions

## First, Say It Is Hot

A Meng asks, “Can you hug me?” Zi Chou replies, “I can, but it’s a little hot.”

A Meng suggests turning on the air conditioner. Zi Chou says, “But that’s too cold.”[4-1]

Here, a hug encounters temperature. The answer begins with “I can,” immediately followed by “hot”; a solution is proposed, and brings another kind of discomfort. Before the matter has been reduced to whether or not there is love, the body has already supplied information that needs to be dealt with.

I want to understand intimacy from this small point. We often treat the body as the executor of feeling: if two people want to come closer, their bodies should carry out that approach. Yet bodies have their own speeds and conditions. Heat, cold, tiredness, and an inability to bear weight can all change an action. These are not additional problems that arise only after emotion. Feelings take shape within these conditions: wait a little, change position, use less force, or perhaps it cannot be done today.

The body’s limits also mean that two people cannot form a whole through willingness alone. What feels right to one person may feel hot to the other; the same action makes different demands on each. Completing something together requires these differences to enter the action, beyond merely obtaining the same answer. Willingness gives a direction; how exactly to proceed remains to be discussed.

Awkwardness then has content. It brings the abstract idea of coming closer into contact with two actual bodies. For film, what is worth seeing extends beyond a complete, beautiful hug. How conditions slow an action, and how people deal with that slowing, may reveal their relation more directly. Film can give small mismatches time, allowing viewers to discover that intimacy has no single posture that suits every body.

In this dialogue, the air conditioner remains a suggestion. For now, I leave this unfinished point open. Once a possible solution has been voiced, the action may continue, or it may need to change direction. The body’s demands have already changed the request.

## From Conditions to Interpretation

Next, Yun Jianhui asks, “Then can you hug me?” Zi Chou replies, “I can.” A Meng then presses, “Then—then why are there so many reasons?” and proposes an explanation of “complicated feelings.”[4-1] A third speaker has joined in: the exchange no longer follows a single line of questions and answers between the same two people.

I am concerned with how “reasons” appear here. The earlier heat and cold pointed to the conditions of the action; the later question begins to probe why those conditions are being raised. The question moves from how to hug to what is going on with the person answering. The two kinds of question can help each other, but one can also displace the other.

Understanding the other person’s feelings is, of course, necessary. Statements about the body do not always fully express what a person wants. Heat may simply be heat, or it may coexist with hesitation; sometimes people have not yet found the right words and can only begin with the part easiest to say. Serious engagement cannot give up interpretation. But interpretation should give the other person more opportunities to explain themselves, rather than arrive first as an already completed answer.

We can compare two ways of asking. “Is there another difficulty?” leaves the original conditions in place and allows new ones to be added. “You are just making excuses” may instead deprive the original words of their effect: the speaker must first prove that they have no other motive before they can return to their immediate discomfort. The two questions leave different amounts of room to continue.

Sometimes the strongest interpretation is also the one most likely to block a response. It can absorb hesitation, objection, and silence into a single judgment. If the other person says no, we think they are not yet willing to face it; if they cannot explain, we think we already see deeper than they do. Such understanding leaves the other person no room to correct it. We seem to be discussing their inner life, while actually coming into contact with less and less of it.

This set of utterances in the film makes that danger available for thought, but does not settle the characters’ full intentions for us. Further questioning may also be an attempt to find a solution. My judgment concerns how interpretation is used: it should return to action and help us deal with the difficulty before us. Knowing that someone has complicated feelings does not relieve us of continuing to listen when they say they are hot.

## Being Recognized and Having One’s Needs Met

The person asking for a hug also has a body and wishes of their own. They may simply need a moment of closeness, or may hope to use that closeness to confirm their place in the other person’s heart. That need deserves to be taken seriously. Acknowledging the body’s conditions does not mean excluding the person making the request from the relationship.

The difficulty is that both people’s needs are real, yet they may not be met at the same time. One person needs closeness, the other distance. If distance is understood as a rejection of the first person as a whole, intimacy takes on an ever heavier task: every action must prove that the relationship still exists, and every hesitation may be read as its disappearance. A limited request thus comes to demand an almost unlimited answer.

I want to bring recognition back into finite actions. Hear the other person’s difficulty and allow it to change what was originally planned; when you cannot meet their need, state your own limits. We do not have to understand another person completely before beginning to respond in this way. Sometimes we do not know where their exhaustion comes from, but can already ease the immediate demand. Conversely, we may know a great deal about someone and still be unwilling to change our arrangements for a difficulty they have voiced.

This does not turn every wish into an obligation for others. A refusal can also take a request seriously: I know what you want, but I cannot do it now; this matters to you, but I cannot fulfil it in the way you hope. Refusal brings disappointment and may change a relationship. At least it allows both people to recognize a specific limit, without requiring one of them to keep pretending.

The desire for recognition often contains a deeper contradiction. I want confirmation from someone independent of me: their answer matters precisely because I do not decide it myself. Yet I am also afraid that this independent person will give an answer I do not want to hear. The more I need their confirmation, then, the more I may want to control the form it takes. The independence on which desire relies also becomes the part it finds hardest to bear.

This contradiction cannot be removed by a single, thorough conversation. Intimacy needs to bear it repeatedly: the other person matters to me, while still not being identical to the person I expect. They can love me and also not want to perform a particular action at this moment. The wish does not thereby become ridiculous, nor does disappointment have to be erased; both need to coexist with the other person’s answer.

## The Eyes Return More Than My Image

In a 2026 research article, I used the motif “I cannot see myself in your eyes” to discuss approach and confirmation.[4-2]

Wanting to see oneself in another person’s eyes is, first of all, an understandable wish. I want my presence to mean something to them; through the way they look at me, I want to know that I am not bearing this relationship alone. But the other person’s eyes are also looking at their own world. They may notice things I have overlooked, bring back judgments I did not expect, and even change how I understand myself.

Confirmation draws its force precisely from this difference. An image returned entirely according to my demands comes increasingly to resemble a result I have arranged in advance. I obtain the appearance I want, yet find it harder to believe that it is another person’s response. To dispel the doubt, I may demand more direct declarations, closer proximity, and more intense commitment. Each proof works for a while, then needs to be followed by another. The harder the other person tries to conform to me, the less certain I can be whether what I receive is them or my own demands.

I do not want to call this longing narcissism too readily. A vulnerable person may also want a clear answer, and anyone in a relationship may need a moment of firm confirmation. The question is whether, after confirmation, we can still hear difference. When the other person states their own conditions, do we learn more about them, or feel that they have broken the assurance they just gave?

This brings intimacy and aesthetics together at the same point. Looking at a face, we may seek only the expression we expect; watching a film, we may likewise seek only images that confirm our existing judgments. Viewing can therefore become narrower the longer we look. To stay a little longer and let an unexpected detail change my understanding is a capacity I want to practise in my work. It does not abolish judgment; it allows the person and material before us to revise it.

However close bodies become, this work cannot be spared. A camera can enlarge a face, an arm, or skin and bring details before our eyes, but it cannot take the place of responses between people. A convincing image of intimacy can coexist with two different feelings. Writing and editing should both leave room for that difference.

That is why the answer about temperature matters to me. Someone did not immediately produce the expected posture; they stated the conditions through which the action still had to pass. The relationship thus gained something more that could be worked on together: how two people approach, where they stop, and whether they continue.

## Sources

[4-1] Historical, manually confirmed dialogue ledger for Shoot Self with You, 6 May 2026; the request for a hug at 01:01:59.933, the answer about temperature at 01:02:06.166, and the follow-up about reasons at 01:02:19.333–21.733. The Chinese wording and speaker attributions follow the manually confirmed fields; the addressees have not been separately confirmed. Earlier manuscript: Chapter 6, sections 6.1–6.2; Chapter 10, sections 10.1–10.3; and Chapter 14. An affirmative answer, a statement of conditions, and the completion of an action are treated separately.

[4-2] He Fa, [‘Imaging with You: The Unowned Second Person and Non-Sovereign Viewing in Shoot Self with You’](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2026/2026-06-09-与你成像-人类投降派-Shoot-Self-with-You-中的无主第二人称与非主权观看-167656737f/), 9 June 2026, the passage on “eyes.” Only the motif proposed in the article is used here; its descriptions of actions that have not been independently checked against image and sound are not carried over. This text does not connect the hug-and-temperature exchange and the eyes motif into a causal sequence within the same scene.


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# Chapter 5 · Who Can Tell the Director to Leave the Stage?

“We have four directors onstage.”

During the public performance in Shoot Self with You, Zi Chou counts the directors: the actual director, the director in the film, the director in the play, and another “director who came from who knows where.” Soon afterward, I criticize the acting and tell Ricky, “Just get off the stage and be a spectator.” He answers, “Why? I’m not getting off.”[5-1]

Suddenly, the word “director” is no longer enough. Several people can hold the title. One gives an instruction; another can still refuse it. The title does not carry out their next action for them.

What interests me in this exchange is how an assessment becomes an instruction. To say someone is acting badly is to judge a performance; to tell them to leave is to change their position within the event. Whether they can still speak, and whether the others carry on, are both affected by this sentence. “Be a spectator” also has concrete consequences here: watching is offered as the position to take after leaving the performance. There is nothing inherently inferior about being a spectator, but in this statement, it is a position assigned by someone else.

Ricky then says, “I know the acting is terrible, but you’re the one who asked me to come and act in this play.”[5-1] He does more than argue about the quality of the acting. He brings up why he came in the first place. Someone has been invited to take part, has given their time and taken on a role, and is now suddenly asked to leave the stage. The invitation collides with the assessment. The original arrangement needs to be explained again.

This adds something else to what is happening. The people in the scene continue acting, while also arguing about how the play should continue.

## Knowing It Is Acting, Still Wanting to Object

After the public performance in 2023, Sun Jiarui wrote about it from his own position. He felt that the performance had stalled and that Xiang Yubin had moved it forward; I appeared, thought this was no good, and told her to leave the stage. He continued: “I knew He Fa was acting, but I really did want to argue back: this is good, it’s good just like this. But I had no strength left.”[5-2]

Jia Rui’s “it’s good just like this” also proposes a measure different from mine. I thought the performance needed to be interrupted; he thought that what had just emerged deserved to continue. Our two judgments did not become one simply because we were part of the same work. I cannot use my position as director to decide his understanding for him, nor can I automatically recast his objection afterward as compelling material that the work required.

I want to keep this in the book. What most deserves attention in collaborative creation often emerges when someone refuses to understand it on my terms. That disagreement prevents me from deciding alone what, exactly, we have just accomplished.

## What Does a Change of Role Change?

P4 experiments with allowing established working roles to change. In a production statement from 2023, I wrote that actors could become directors, camera operators could become actors, those documenting could also act, and performers could also observe.[5-3] This expresses a way of working we hoped for: no one has to remain locked into a single function forever. When someone documenting the work steps in front of the camera, they have to face, in their own body, difficulties they previously watched. When performers help organize the work, they can also propose how they want to appear.

The value of such changes depends on whether they alter the concrete next step. If someone is merely called a director but cannot change the task, propose cuts or revisions, or refuse to continue, the new title gives them little room to act. Someone who both films and performs may simply be doing more work, without gaining more opportunities to decide.

A shift in working roles therefore needs a response from others. When someone proposes another way of doing things, the others have to make time for it. When someone says they cannot do something now, those present cannot treat this only as an obstacle for the performance to overcome. The measure of collaborative creation lies here: can another person’s presence change my original arrangement?

This does not require every disagreement to end in concession. Someone still has to decide how the scene moves forward, and not all views can be accommodated at once. Judgment has to address what the disagreement is about. Ricky gives his reason for coming at someone’s invitation; Jia Rui believes that Xiang Yubin has already moved the stalled scene forward. These are concrete views that can be discussed and also opposed. Classifying them as obedience or disobedience would make the actual questions disappear.

There is also a creative gain here. The original plan may not have room for everything a person can do. Outside their assigned role, they may propose a better method, or point out a problem everyone has grown so used to that they no longer notice it. If every change must first be imagined by the person who initiated the project, the others merely increase the number of people carrying it out. Working together matters because I, too, may follow a direction I had not foreseen and find my own work anew within it.

## Putting My Own Position into the Work

“Who can tell the director to leave the stage?” is also a question I ask myself. An actor can be interrupted; can a director’s arrangements be interrupted in the same way? When someone holding a camera wants a particular image, can the person being filmed make them change that wish?

These questions cannot be resolved simply by filming the camera or letting the director appear onscreen. I can place myself inside the work while still deciding how others are seen. Revealing my presence only makes my position visible. What matters next is what kinds of objection that position will accept.

In the public performance, at least the judgments and refusals have been spoken. They leave the film with material different from a complete performance: how a scene is stopped, how someone argues for staying and continuing, and how a participant later writes down an objection they could not fully express at the time. Film can bring these things from different moments together, so that the director’s judgment at the time is no longer the only point of entry.

But I also have to acknowledge a distinction that collaboration cannot erase. Many people are present, yet the finished film still passes through selection. Who is given more time, whose hesitation is kept, which image precedes an objection—all affect how later viewers understand the dispute. Even if every piece of footage records something that actually happened, its arrangement still comes from specific decisions.

Openness during creation makes the work of editing harder. Keeping a disagreement can let different judgments remain at odds. It can also be arranged so that all we see is a generous author and people who seem difficult to work with. Including someone who objects does not mean the film has taken care to preserve their reasons.

The demand I can make is that those reasons remain discernible. Why Ricky refuses to leave the stage, and why Jia Rui thinks “it’s good just like this,” cannot be turned entirely into the emotional atmosphere of the scene. Later viewers should have a chance to disagree with me on those grounds. That possibility does not weaken the author’s work. It demands greater precision in the author’s choices: what have I kept here, and what have I deprived of a chance to answer?

A collaboratively made film does not turn everyone into the same author. It can allow different people to remain different within the work. The director still has decisions to make, but cannot use those decisions to end the argument on everyone’s behalf.

## Sources

[5-1] Shoot Self with You, V10 human-confirmed Chinese dialogue and speaker-role ledger, May 6, 2026. Stable records HS4G-SUB-2012, HS4G-SUB-2016, HS4G-SUB-0722, HS4G-SUB-0724, and HS4G-SUB-0725; historical navigation approximately 02:13:05–02:13:25. The discussion follows the sequence of speech on the basis of the words and their attributed speakers; it does not supply unverified actions or tones of voice.

[5-2] Sun Jiarui, [“I Disappeared—After Performing The Last Rehearsal”](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2023/2023-09-02-人类投降派-我消失了-在演完-最后的排练-之后-50a18864f8/), September 2, 2023. See the paragraph beginning “Binbin really did save the situation.” This retrospective account is presented separately from the dialogue cited above; they have not been combined into a single verbatim record of the event.

[5-3] He Fa, [“The Story of Shoot Self with You—Will the Aliens Return?”](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2023/2023-08-18-艺术公演-人类投降派-始末-外星人还会再次降临吗-76791e9eb6/), August 18, 2023, the closing postscript and the paragraph that follows it. The account of fluid working roles follows the creator’s public statement at the time; it is not treated as evidence that equal decision-making power had been achieved.


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# Chapter 6 · The Camera Separates Us

## Standing in the Same Room

A rehearsal can crowd actors, directors, camera operators, and spectators into the same space. Yet the finished film always gives later viewers only part of that space. Some people enter the frame; some remain as voices; some have their position indicated only by another person’s gaze offscreen. Once filmed, their shared presence already takes on different degrees of visibility.

This determines how I understand the camera’s participation.

The person filming can approach someone, select their face, and follow their movements. In doing so, they may lose someone else’s reaction. Getting closer does not necessarily mean understanding more. A close-up gives weight to a face while pushing its surrounding conditions offscreen. A hesitant expression, detached from the request it faces, can easily be taken as a character trait. A statement detached from the arrangement that brought it forth can likewise be read as a self-contained confession.

Moving the camera farther away does not automatically solve the problem. A wide shot can preserve several people’s positions while making the smallest gestures between them difficult to discern. Including many people in one image does not distribute their importance equally. Light and shadow, front and back, and distance from the camera all help determine who is easier to see.

These are choices cinema has to make every day. I want to begin with such choices when speaking about truth. The frame need not contain the entire event, but it must give the fragment it keeps a reason to stand. The more clearly a shot seems to show someone, the more necessary it is to understand what has been excluded to make that clarity possible.

In an image of the public event in Shoot Self with You, spectators, a transparent partition, and lighting equipment enter the same field of view. A light stand occupies part of the image, spectators are on the other side, and bodies share the space with the objects that keep the event running. The performance does not fill the entire frame; the space supporting it is also retained.[6-1]

But showing equipment is only a beginning. Equipment does not do the film’s reflecting for it. It has to enter into relations with people’s positions, words, and choices to become more than another object at the event. Seeing who faces the performance area, who stands beside the partition, and what blocks another part of the view gives us concrete conditions of viewing that we can question.

What interests me is allowing the conditions of viewing to enter what is viewed. A spectator can recognize whom a person is addressing and also realize that they are seeing this person through someone else’s choices. A film’s honesty need not depend on the disappearance of the person filming.

## A Sentence Belongs to More Than One Face

Sound unsettles the borders of the frame. The image gives us only what is before us, while sound can bring in another space. Hearing someone without seeing them, and seeing someone without knowing whether they are listening, are two different ways of being with others.

In Shoot Self with You, near the dialogue about embracing and temperature, the image shifts from a wide shot of the bathing pool to a close view of bodies on a bed.[6-2] The wide shot places the bodies within their surroundings; the closer view gives weight to faces, arms, and cushions. As these two scales meet, viewing shifts from the space the people occupy to parts of their bodies and nearby objects.

The dialogue makes temperature a condition, while the close view gives weight to bodily shapes and positions. An embrace thus appears as more than a declaration or a wish: it also involves postures and distances that have to be coordinated. Sound and image may not show the continuous completion of the same action, yet together they can present intimacy as something that needs to be worked out. Cinematic thought can arise from such connections.

This is also why I do not want to understand offscreen speech merely as missing information. Some voices need a speaker to be found; others have an effect precisely because they cannot immediately be fixed to a face. A voice may be speaking of its own experience, quoting a character, or allowing someone who has left the frame to keep affecting what is happening. Identifying every sound source can sometimes prevent a mistaken attribution; at other times, it erases a distance the film has deliberately kept.

The value of that distance depends on what it allows us to compare that could not previously be seen together, and how it changes the meaning of a statement. An incidental relation between sound and image may gain force in the finished film; deliberately manufactured ambiguity may simply make recognition harder.

Someone can say “I,” but the film can bring that statement before people who were not originally present. The words still have a source; the range of people receiving them has changed. The director has to take responsibility for that change. It also gives viewers a chance to hear the statement again from a different position.

## How Much Must Remain for Us to See?

Once an experience enters the editing room, another difficulty arises. For those who took part, every gesture has memories before and after it. Viewers do not have those memories. Keeping an entire piece of footage cannot also give them what the camera never recorded.

Creators can easily overestimate how self-evident their material is. That moment mattered so much—how could anyone fail to see it? But the work has to make clear what, exactly, mattered. A silence may come from waiting, exhaustion, or simply equipment that is not yet ready. If the relevant conditions all remain outside the film, prolonging the silence does not automatically bring viewers closer to the experience of those involved.

Cutting therefore has constructive work to do. It gives a place to distinctions previously submerged in a mass of activity, allowing one statement to meet the next statement that actually changes its use. Editing can also make an action appear more isolated, more certain, even more like someone’s essential nature. Keeping and cutting both shape judgment; neither is inherently innocent.

Discussing the making of L’Amour fou, Rivette distinguishes the unfolding of events during filming from their organization in editing. The shoot can give time to things not yet known, while the work still has to choose among the material that remains.[6-3] This matters to my own practice. Opening up the event does not require me to surrender every judgment in postproduction as well.

How much time I give a piece of footage should depend on how the relations within it change. If another attempt makes an earlier instruction cease to work, lets someone else take over the questioning, or leads viewers to revise their understanding of the previous action, that duration is doing work. If each repetition merely confirms what is already known, keeping it may chiefly satisfy the creator’s reluctance to leave the event behind.

Nor can this judgment be reduced to cutting repetition. Some repetition works precisely by accumulating pressure, making a request that was initially easy to accept increasingly difficult to bear. Viewers’ fatigue can become material for the work. But the film still needs to give that fatigue an object: what is being repeated, who has to continue, and who can call a halt? A general demand that viewers endure a long duration merely passes responsibility for form on to them.

We can imagine how a request cut off as soon as an answer appears, and one that keeps the revisions and further questions after the answer, would make two different scenes. The first emphasizes the reply; the second lets its meaning continue to change. In comparing these possible edits, the key question is what the additional time actually changes.

I do not ask film to make experience smooth. It can be difficult to understand, offer resistance, and make us hesitate. The difficulty needs to lie in the difficulty of the experience itself, while form must make that difficulty approachable. Between disordered material and a difficult work lies a choice that cannot be skipped.

## A Stranger Sits Before the Screen

Once the film is finished, viewers occupy a different position from those who took part in rehearsals. A later viewer cannot alter the rules of the time, interrupt at that moment, or change what has already happened. They can pause, watch again, compare what comes before and after, or reject the interpretation the work wants them to accept.

This distance has capacities of its own. A reaction that had to be made quickly at the event can be reconsidered in the film; words drowned out by a louder voice may gain weight when seen again. A viewer’s understanding need not reproduce any participant’s experience. If a film can only stand by saying “you had to be there,” it still has not given enough to strangers.

Rancière’s critique of the idea of the passive spectator helps me preserve this capacity for viewing. Sitting and watching does not mean doing nothing; understanding also involves selecting, connecting, and translating.[6-4] Film cannot prescribe where these connections must end for the viewer. Creators can offer relations, but cannot reclaim every possible understanding in advance.

This does not mean that form can settle for vagueness. Precisely because viewers have judgments of their own, a film should give them something they can judge. A participant’s statement needs enough surrounding material for its circumstances to be discerned. An abrupt transition needs traces that invite inquiry. A duration that refuses to end needs gradually to reveal the differences it retains.

I want strangers to be able to enter P4 without first having to agree with it. A work should make its choices available, giving both engagement and objection something concrete to address. The camera separates those who were present from those who come later, and also leaves them a form through which to meet again.

## Sources

[6-1] Shoot Self with You, fixed 4K master, frame at 02:32:25.000. The objects discernible in the foreground are lights and light stands; the general term “camera equipment” used in older materials is not retained. For the image source and sampling time, see the list of plates at the end of the book.

[6-2] Two frames from the fixed master, at 01:02:20.000 and 01:02:20.500; dialogue reference: V10 human-confirmed Chinese dialogue and speaker-role ledger, May 6, 2026. This passage discusses only the change in images shown by adjacent samples. It does not establish a word-level edit point or whether the embrace was completed.

[6-3] Jacques Rivette, excerpt from an interview in Cahiers du cinéma, no. 204, 1968; see [MoMA’s programme notes for L’Amour fou](https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/7329). This chapter draws only on his distinction between events during filming and the organization of the finished film.

[6-4] Jacques Rancière, Le spectateur émancipé, La fabrique, 2008. See the [excerpt from pages 18–29 in the materials for the Strasbourg conference “Penser le spectateur”](https://labo-laps.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/colloque-penser-le-spectateur.pdf), on the spectator’s acts of selecting, comparing, and interpreting. This chapter brings that question to the viewing of films.


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# Chapter 7 · Behind the White Cloth

This disappearance had a procedure agreed on beforehand.

Sun Jiarui describes it clearly in his account after the performance: cover everyone with the white cloth lying on the floor, go backstage, and quietly leave, so the audience sees only a piece of cloth remaining onstage. “It’s a magic trick.”[7-1]

Several people have to carry out this arrangement together. Someone picks up the cloth, someone is covered, and everyone leaves by the agreed route. To let an audience see a disappearance, a series of very concrete actions first has to be organized. The cloth has to hide the people; the backstage route has to be passable; what is onstage and where the audience sits have to form a certain relation. Disappearance is given a form that can be carried out.

Within this staging, we know what to do next. Yet a question arises as the action nears completion.

Jia Rui writes that, when they reached the exit, A Meng suddenly asked whether this was what he wanted: to go somewhere no one was, where no one could find him. The lines were not in the script. He answered, “Yes, yes.” Looking back, he still could not say whether he had wanted to finish the performance quickly or felt that she had indeed touched on something important.[7-1]

A planned disappearance left an answer that the plan had not resolved.

## Who Wants to Disappear?

A Meng’s question turns attention from the action to the wish. An exit performed by several people together suddenly requires an answer from one person: is this what you want?

“How to do it” could be settled by discussion. What to cover the bodies with, where to leave, and what to leave for the audience could all be rehearsed beforehand. “Is this what you want?” calls for a different kind of answer. It brings the arranged action back before the person performing it and asks them to explain their relation to it.

Sometimes the two coincide. By carrying out an action, someone may indeed express something they have long wanted to say. But an action can also accommodate other reasons: cooperating with a partner, following the rehearsal, bringing things to a smooth close, or simply finishing what is immediately at hand. A single “yes” cannot separate these reasons one by one. Jia Rui’s later account preserves their entanglement.

This also makes me reluctant to call an unplanned question a direct route to someone’s inner life. It did change the event, because beyond the scheduled exit, something else now required a response. But what the questioner touched on still has to emerge gradually through the answer, the actions, and later understanding. The suddenness of a question does not automatically make the answer more truthful.

In the film’s manually verified dialogue record, A Meng asks, “So is this what you want?” and Jia Rui answers, “Yes.” She then says, “No one can see you,” and he answers again, “Yes.”[7-2] Two affirmations have been spoken, yet the questions are not exhausted.

What remains unfinished lies elsewhere: someone has answered without necessarily being able to grasp every reason for that answer.

## Understanding Continues After the Answer

Everyday life often asks people to know what they want before they act. Actual experience is less orderly. Someone may agree and only later discover that they cannot bear it, or refuse and only afterward realize what they are reluctant to lose. They may still hold several explanations much later.

Jia Rui’s writing gives this concrete weight. He does not deny having said “yes,” nor does he erase his answer at the time. He tries to explain it, then stops within the explanation. Wanting the performance to end and being touched by the question are two possibilities he himself proposes. The account does not declare one true and the other false.

I cannot choose for him from outside. Nor need this uncertainty be treated as an understanding he has not yet attained, as though asking a few more times would finally yield a pure cause. Some actions are moved by several forces from the outset. Reducing them to a single motive may produce clarity only by subtraction.

This does not make every explanation equal. His statement that the exit under the white cloth had been agreed on in advance limits accounts of the whole ending as a sudden departure. His observation that A Meng’s question was not in the script also prevents the entire exchange from being classified as predetermined dialogue. His account provides facts sufficient to change our understanding without giving a psychological answer that accounts for the whole event.

What I value is precisely the possibility of keeping both. Specific events can be clarified without closing off someone’s entire experience. A theory that calls every uncertainty profound loses its judgment; a film that treats every answer as a person’s final confession brings that person to an end too soon.

At the beginning of his account, Jia Rui also writes that friends came to check on him and express concern. Some thanked him; some said he was sacrificing himself again. Yet he did not understand what he had done to deserve thanks, or what counted as sacrifice. What he could confirm was that he did get himself very dirty after every performance.[7-1]

This is a sharp point. People see the same performance and leave with different accounts. Gratitude and concern may be sincere and still miss the experience of the person involved. To see someone as sacrificing himself may praise his commitment while also placing him in a role he does not recognize. Caring about him requires hearing his hesitation about these accounts.

## The Cloth Does Not Fully Explain a Person

The white cloth also does practical work in the film. It changes how bodies are visible: clothing, faces, and individual positions become hard to distinguish, leaving raised shapes, folds in the fabric, and partial edges. For a time, individuals are gathered beneath a shared material.

But the film does not show only this cloth. In the images near the exchange, backstage computers, control equipment, and crew members also appear. After the cloth fills the image, those people and pieces of equipment can be seen again.[7-3] The arrangement for disappearing and the activities that keep the event running thus enter the same passage of film.

This makes it difficult for the white cloth to stand alone as a complete symbol. If only the image of the covered people remained, we might readily read it as death, collective withdrawal, or some kind of becoming one. The presence of backstage resists these readings. Disappearance still depends on a place where people are working, on sound and equipment continuing to operate. The people and things that do not disappear also constitute this disappearance.

I want to preserve that discordance. Art can create an image, and should also make room for the labor that makes it possible. Isolating the white cloth and cropping it into a solemn image would make the exit look like a single, completed decision. Returning it to its concrete space lets us see how many people and stages of work sustain this form together.

Film also places another difficulty before disappearance: this disappearance has been filmed. People leave the stage, while the image keeps traces of their leaving. Viewers can watch again and again, but the white cloth cannot guarantee anyone freedom from being watched thereafter.

This contradiction need not be resolved. Filming preserves an action that took place, but preserving the action cannot decide for the person involved how they wish to appear in the future. The easier an image is to replay, the more necessary it becomes to remember that it preserves an occurrence, not a definition of someone that holds forever.

## Several Endings

The staging with the white cloth is meant to end a performance; Jia Rui’s answer responds to a question in the moment; his later account continues to understand that answer. They happen at different times and accomplish different things. Forcing them into a single ending would let one of them decide for the others.

The white cloth lets several people disappear together before an audience, giving the ending a visible form. Jia Rui’s later writing loosens that form again. The exit is complete; the meaning of the answer is still changing.

Jia Rui said “yes.” Later, he wrote that he did not know.

These two statements can remain together. The film need not cross either one out for him when it ends.

## Sources

[7-1] Sun Jiarui, [“I Disappeared—After Performing The Last Rehearsal”](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2023/2023-09-02-人类投降派-我消失了-在演完-最后的排练-之后-50a18864f8/), September 2, 2023. See the opening account of friends’ responses, and the passages beginning “So the play had to go on,” “I was going to use the white cloth on the floor,” and “We reached the exit as usual.” The staging, the unplanned question, and the motives for the answer are treated separately, following his retrospective account.

[7-2] Shoot Self with You, V10 human-confirmed Chinese dialogue and speaker-role ledger, May 6, 2026, HS4G-SUB-0827 through HS4G-SUB-0830. Historical navigation: 02:31:01.700–02:31:10.100. The wording recalled in Sun Jiarui’s article is presented separately from this dialogue record; the two are not conflated as a single verbatim transcript.

[7-3] 《人类投降派 无字幕 28g 4k.mov》, fixed 4K master, 24 fps; saved contact sheets sampled at 2 fps from 02:30:55–02:31:24.5, focusing on 02:31:05–02:31:14.5. This passage uses only the sequence of images to discuss the visible relations among backstage, the cloth, and bodies. Speaker attribution follows [7-2]; visible faces are not used to identify sound sources.


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# Chapter 8 · How Long Does an Ending Take?

## An Ending Also Has an Object

“Our performance is over.”[8-1]

To announce an ending is to state publicly the moment when performing stops. It sends a signal to the audience and the performers; how that signal takes effect still depends on what people do next. A performance can end while each person continues to understand what has just happened.

In the dialogue near the end of Shoot Self with You, the announcement that the performance is over is followed by a question about the toilet. “Who peed on the floor in the toilet?” recurs in the record.[8-1] It is easy to overlook, because it does not fit a solemn ending. Yet it also shows precisely that, once the task is over, the space is still in use and there are still things someone needs to deal with.

I do not want to elevate this everyday remark into a symbol. The toilet is the toilet. The first significance of leaving it here is that a concrete demand is not covered over by a summing-up. People have spent a long time talking about art, love, and disappearance; life in the room has not paused as a result.

The film can choose to cut this sentence or let it remain. If it remains, the ending contains two different directions: the performance is releasing people from its task, while a new demand of daily life has already arrived. They need not cancel each other out. The first has an announcement of its ending; the second has an object of its own.

This also keeps a distance between the film’s ending and the way things wind down in life. The film has to decide what to leave at the end. It need not wait for every problem to be resolved, and has no power to resolve them all. What editing decides is where viewers leave the work.

## Giving Backstage Back to Sound

I once made a specific clarification about the divisions of Shoot Self with You: the section between the numbers 4 and 5 is backstage. It involves Ru Meng’s live score, the screen, the space behind the scenes, and the offscreen speech that follows the announcements. The closing section after the number 5 is separate.[8-2]

This distinction affects how the whole film is understood. To treat everything after the number 4 as credits and archiving would be to describe work still taking place as material already finished. Backstage has activities of its own; “the performance receding from view” is not enough to describe them.

We are used to seeing the stage as the center of an event, with backstage ensuring that the center appears as it should. Lights come on, sound comes through, images enter the screen, and the actions the audience sees can continue. Yet the people producing these conditions are often left outside the work. Once backstage enters the film, what previously counted as support begins to become something we watch.

This changes the weight of things. The force of a sentence onstage no longer comes only from the speaker’s emotion. It also depends on how the sentence was heard, through what equipment it entered the event, and what other sounds surrounded it. The person in the image does not necessarily occupy the entire sound field. Someone who never enters the shot can still change the space being viewed through sound.

What interests me in this section is allowing the activities that sustain the performance to keep taking visible form. Live scoring is participation in progress; the screen is part of the event; sounds continue to be produced after the announcements. Treating all of this as the remains of a performance deprives these activities of their own place.

Nor does backstage become more truthful than onstage simply by being filmed. Someone who has stepped out of a role may still be aware of the camera; leaving the performance area may also be part of an agreement. The distinction between onstage and backstage concerns first the organization of activity: what is being presented, what makes that presentation possible, and where this division of labor is rearranged by a new act of filming.

By joining the two, film can make previously unseen dependencies visible. But it has to work on the connection itself. Juxtaposing live sound, offscreen speech, screens, and images does not naturally produce a complete thought. Viewers need to be able to discern, through their relations, how the center of attention moves, what work was previously obscured, and which voices now have a place.

I therefore want to write about this section as a backstage still in progress, and then discuss how it moves into the ending. The numbers mark boundaries; they are not labels that flatten everything.

## Where Does Time Come From?

By this point, the question of time is no longer only one of length.

Completing a task takes time. Waiting for someone’s answer takes time. After the answer arrives, understanding what it means to oneself also takes time. These times sometimes coincide and sometimes come apart. What film can do is make the differences between them something we experience.

Suspense can make us wait for an answer. When the answer arrives, the wait is explained. Another situation is more difficult: an answer has appeared, but the scene has not ended because of it. People keep talking, or the original question is asked again. What deserves attention then is what the answer has accomplished and what it has left unresolved.

Calling all of this a failure of communication is too hasty. The answer may be perfectly clear, the refusal may already stand, and yet the questioner may still be demanding a different result. Sometimes continued waiting gives someone time to understand; sometimes it refuses to accept the reply they have already given. Duration cannot judge the value of these two kinds of waiting for us.

Likewise, someone’s hesitation or uncertainty about what to do in a film does not by itself establish that the work is thinking about time. Hesitation may simply belong to a plot that has not yet been fully explained. As long as the goal and outcome of an action are enough to account for the duration, we can still understand what the film is making us wait for.

When Deleuze discusses the time-image, a crucial question concerns the link between perception and action. When action is no longer sufficient to respond to what is seen, the presentation of time calls for another understanding. This differs from a character temporarily having trouble getting something done.[8-3] Following this question, I want to ask whether answering and completion within a relation might also lose their habitual synchronization.

Starting from my own material, what interests me more is this: how can a film let an answer already given continue to acquire new meanings?[8-4]

For example, a film can end a shot after an answer, let another person’s reaction enter, or follow it with an earlier expression. Each arrangement may change our sense of when something is complete. These are possibilities of form. To say how far a particular film has realized them still requires identifying its actual sequences of sound and image precisely.

Understanding time this way preserves reasons for a long film while also allowing criticism of it. Length can give meaning room to change; it can also keep a judgment that has already been established from drawing to a close. Discussing time should not give my work immunity from the question, “Why does this still need to continue?”

## The Last Sentence

Near the ending, Jia Rui says, “I just don’t care about anything.”[8-1]

The closer a sentence is to the end, the more easily it is given the power to sum up the whole film. Yet “not caring” does not automatically specify its object, or account for the speaker’s entire experience. To read it as utter failure, final release, or a philosophy of life requires traveling farther than the sentence itself goes.

Its force can remain in the statement made at that time. People sometimes use a sentence to stop explaining for the moment, to stop supplying reasons. By preserving it, the film can make that stopping available to view. It can also use the sentence’s position at the end to turn a stop into a conclusion. These are two effects the editor has to face.

I do not want to use the last sentence to cancel the attempts to draw close, the objections, and the waiting that came before. Nor do I want to embellish it into a truth the person has finally reached. An ending can concentrate an experience, but should not use concentration as a reason to take away the distinctions within it.

The closing credits do something else. They leave names attached to the production, making collaboration recognizable. Credits matter, but they cannot claim someone’s statements on their behalf or take the place of a participant’s account of what it all means to them. A film can end with these names; the people they name will go on living.

A book faces the same difficulty. Writing can make things clear on a page, but clarity does not mean drawing everyone’s experience into the same answer. An ending is best left to a definite but limited judgment: what we did, what the work chose, and what remains for living people to decide.

## Sources

[8-1] Shoot Self with You, V10 manually verified Chinese dialogue and speaker-role ledger, May 6, 2026. Historical navigation for He Fa’s “Our performance is over”: approximately 02:32:00.266; Zi Chou’s question about the toilet is recorded at 02:32:22.000, 02:32:25.100, and 02:32:48.100; Jia Rui’s final sentence occurs at 02:33:26.066–02:33:27.166. Historical timecodes serve as locators; they are not presented as absolute timecodes of the fixed master verified word by word through a fresh listening check.

[8-2] He Fa (identified as “作者Owner,” or “Author/Owner,” in the original record), unpublished dialogue correction, May 24, 2026: “Correction to Part Five: The Backstage Sound Field Between 4 and 5, and to the Subtitled Trailer.” The account of Ru Meng’s live score, the screen, offscreen speech after the announcements, and the boundary between Parts Five and Six comes from the author’s record. The analysis develops from that record; still frames are not used to claim that unverified sounds have been heard.

[8-3] Gilles Deleuze, film lecture, February 26, 1985, [Cinema and Thought, Lecture 13](https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/lecture/lecture-13-7/), English translation by Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni, Purdue University. This passage refers to the discussion of the sensory-motor schema and the presentation of time.

[8-4] Gilles Deleuze, lecture of June 1, 1982, [Sur le cinéma : l’image-mouvement et l’image-temps](https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/316). Discussion of Hitchcock, the relation-image, and objects as bearers of relations. “Relation–time image” is the name this book retains for a question, not a category originally proposed by Deleuze.


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# Chapter 9 · A Work Cannot Live Someone’s Life for Them

## Worth Keeping Does Not Mean It Was All Worthwhile

Once an experience becomes a film, it gains a new life. It can be watched repeatedly, leave its original room, and reach people who do not know the participants. The camera gives a moment a form that remains, and the work gains the possibility of continuing to be understood.

I took part in the process, chose what to keep, and now have to defend the form in which it is kept. The easiest explanation would be to describe every difficulty in the process as a necessary price for the work’s creation, and every flaw in the work as proof that life cannot be put in order. Then everything could testify on the author’s behalf.

I need to break this circle, allowing actions during production and choices in the finished film to be judged separately.

“Non-guarantee” is my name for this boundary. It points to a common expectation with consequences: because I have created the conditions, I hope that the result will arrive in accordance with my wishes; because the work has come into being, I hope that the participants will also accept its interpretation of the past.

This expectation becomes especially clear in what we ask of others. Lights can be switched on as agreed, filming can begin on schedule, and footage can be stored according to standards. These are things that should be done. Whether someone is moved as a result, wishes to keep drawing closer, or identifies with their own image still requires their own response. A work can take part in these changes, but cannot list them in advance as results to be delivered.

Acknowledging this makes the aims of creation more concrete. I can arrange an encounter with care, give expression time, and make choices in editing. I also have to accept that what others do with these conditions may require the original aim to change.

## Change Can Move in Different Directions

A change in relations need not take the form of greater intimacy. It may also make distance clear: someone discovers that they do not want to continue in a role; someone realizes that a shared task can no longer sustain their earlier expectations. After people part, their past encounter has still taken place, and its meaning need not disappear.

Calling every refusal a formation of relations would deprive the term of its distinctions. We need to look at what the refusal changes: does it clarify a previously vague expectation, shift someone’s position, or simply leave the same problem to the next person?

Art can give form to these differences. Some works let us see someone gradually lose room to act; others reveal previously overlooked reasons for an exit. The first need not provide a way out to demonstrate optimism, and the second need not describe separation as victory. The strength of form lies in making the situation precise, so that the cost of its outcome can be understood.

This keeps a distance from treating art as a therapeutic tool. I do not ask every work to improve its participants’ lives, or to repair its audience. If improvement actually occurs, it deserves recognition; its absence is not enough to declare a work ineffective. Tragedy, too, can help us understand a situation without freeing its characters from it.

Nor does art need deliberately to withhold consolation in order to prove its depth. Ease, humor, and brief pleasure are no shallower than pain when they have a concrete source. Treating laughter as superficial and breakdown as depth would force creation continually to increase what people must endure, until intensity becomes the only distinction left in experience.

I am more concerned with whether a work makes a previously elusive difference perceptible: a request shifting from care into pressure, an act of cooperation giving someone a new position, or a shared task finally exposing different aims. Such changes need not be dramatic, yet they can force us to reconsider what has already happened.

What we call depth should withstand this kind of concrete explanation. It cannot rely on a string of ever more abstract terms to push readers away from the person before them.

## Theory Should Make a Work Open to Criticism

If Relational Image Theory is useful, it should make works easier to criticize accurately.

All films involve relations; that is certainly true. Actors have relations with roles, shots with one another, and works with audiences. Merely pointing out these connections cannot justify this book. What I want to ask is whether a film also organizes the conditions under which relations form and change into the experience of viewing.

Here, the relations represented and the relations organizing the performance can touch one another. A line carries out a character’s task and may also become a demand on the performer. The title “director” belongs to the scene and also bears on who can decide whether to continue. A stretch of sound preserves a statement and also changes who in the image has a position from which to explain themselves. Viewers encounter more than the outcomes between characters; they can also discern how those outcomes were brought about.

Documentary material has no exclusive claim to this. A tightly scripted fiction film can also change the conditions of its characters’ actions and use sound and editing to expose how judgments are formed in viewing. Conversely, a film using real people can readily compress a complex process into a single character trait, leaving participants only to prove a conclusion the author already knows. Categories of truth and fiction cannot make choices of form for a film.

P4’s contribution to these questions has to be recognized in concrete work: how a role allows someone to enter, how a request changes its use, how a cloth makes disappearance an action, how backstage reenters the image. Bringing these together reveals that art both brings events about and later chooses their form. These two kinds of work affect each other and may also conflict.

This is more demanding than declaring that everything is connected. If the film has not made the relevant conditions visible, however rich the participants’ explanations may be, those explanations can only supplement the production history. They cannot retroactively establish that the finished film already made viewers experience those conditions. If an interpretation relies on stories I tell outside the film, I should acknowledge that the thought is unfolding in the book; the work may not have done the same thing.

This book therefore also allows for judgments unfavorable to Shoot Self with You. A passage may be kept too long, a connection between sound and image may be insufficiently articulated, or an act of self-revelation may remain a gesture. Identifying these problems requires attending to actual passages and the work they were meant to do. A film cannot be dismissed simply because it is “hard to enter,” nor can its origin in an experience important to me exempt it from such judgment.

I am willing to let theory take this risk. If a concept fails before the material, narrow its scope. If a scene already makes itself clear without theory, let it speak. The weight of a book depends not on how much its terminology covers, but on which formerly vague judgments it makes precise.

## Making Room for the Next Answer

A photograph keeps someone in a particular posture. A film puts their actions into a sequence. A book then interprets those actions as a form of thought. Each completed form makes it easier to believe that we have come closer to that person.

We may have come closer. What needs guarding against is extending that approach into a permanent authority to interpret them.

People change their understanding of old images, and may no longer wish to use their earlier accounts. Such change need not be taken as evidence that they were untruthful at the time. What someone said at a particular moment remains an action they took then; a later revision also belongs to their life. The old work can continue to exist, and the new answer should also have a place.

This leaves an inconvenient distance between the author and the person portrayed. The director needs to make a film clear, selective, and able to end, while the person may continue to object to the form the film gives them. We cannot abolish that distance by abandoning editing. Piling footage together without selection is also a way of treating people.

The author can only take responsibility for the choice and make it available to be seen, discussed, and reinterpreted. A work’s judgment can be firm without pretending that it encompasses the whole person.

I want to leave images that let a stranger approach an experience previously unconnected to them. They need not accept my explanation of myself, or come to love everyone onscreen. If they can discern how a request took shape, how a response was altered, and how the film led them to make a judgment of their own, then this viewing already has substance.

As for those who actually took part, the work should not require them to remain forever in the position of giving it meaning. After the encounter, they have other relations, other wishes, and the freedom to stop talking about this film.

I am responsible for finishing the film. The people in it need not be finished along with it.

## Sources

This chapter sets out the author’s position, following the material analysis in the preceding eight chapters. It adds no new accounts of participants’ experiences or facts about the film. The distinction between what art does and its results also draws on the excerpt from Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator cited in Chapter Six; “non-guarantee” is this book’s own term. Regarding possible shortcomings in Shoot Self with You, the chapter proposes directions and criteria for criticism. It does not present a close examination not yet carried out as an established finding.