Works and Sources

[1-1] He Fa, ‘The Story of Shoot Self with You—Will the Aliens Return?’, 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?’, 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’, 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.

[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!’, 19 August 2023.

[2-3] Sun Jiarui, ‘I Disappeared—After Performing The Last Rehearsal’, 2 September 2023. The quotation is from his account after the performance.

[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”, 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’, 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.

[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’, 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.

[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”, 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?”, 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.

[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. 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”, on the spectator’s acts of selecting, comparing, and interpreting. This chapter brings that question to the viewing of films.

[7-1] Sun Jiarui, “I Disappeared—After Performing The Last Rehearsal”, 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.

[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, 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. 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.

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.