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

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.

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.

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.

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.