Republished in full on the official website: 8 October 2026. Source edition: the Chinese manuscript dated 8 October 2026.
Editorial introduction
How can rehearsal enable something real to happen, and why can it not command it?
Abstract: Taking the problem of rehearsal in P4 Theater's Shoot Self with You as its starting point, this essay reads the project alongside Ryusuke Hamaguchi's working methods, Diderot's paradox of acting, and Derrida's concept of iterability. It distinguishes the reproduction of form, familiarity within a relationship, and demands for authenticity. The nature of repetition, it argues, is determined neither by the number of repetitions nor by binaries such as control/freedom or technique/genuine feeling. What matters is how each repetition changes the conditions of action, attention, and response. Rehearsal can give people expressive capacities they did not previously possess, but those capacities cannot guarantee another person's expected response. Form can make real experience possible without making that experience an outcome a creator can demand on schedule. Art's lack of a guarantee is therefore not creative incapacity: it is a condition under which form can still accommodate another person.
- Shoot Self with You: project page: background and related historical articles.
- Public screening edition / Shoot Self with You: the complete screening edition, distinguished from derivative archival edits.
Once Again
How can rehearsal enable something real to happen, and why can it not command it?
Relational Image Theory · Essay One
Abstract: Taking the problem of rehearsal in P4 Theater's Shoot Self with You as its starting point, this essay reads the project alongside Ryusuke Hamaguchi's working methods, Diderot's paradox of acting, and Derrida's concept of iterability. It distinguishes the reproduction of form, familiarity within a relationship, and demands for authenticity. The nature of repetition, it argues, is determined neither by the number of repetitions nor by binaries such as control/freedom or technique/genuine feeling. What matters is how each repetition changes the conditions of action, attention, and response. Rehearsal can give people expressive capacities they did not previously possess, but those capacities cannot guarantee another person's expected response. Form can make real experience possible without making that experience an outcome a creator can demand on schedule. Art's lack of a guarantee is therefore not creative incapacity: it is a condition under which form can still accommodate another person.
1. Rehearsal's most tempting promise: next time will be different
“Once again” is a phrase that presses the past and the future together.
It first delivers a judgment: what just happened was not enough. It then makes a promise: it can be better. The previous attempt is thereby renamed preparation, while the next temporarily occupies the position of the right answer.
There is a moving generosity in rehearsal. It allows people not to be permanently defined by their first performance. A misspoken line can be spoken again; a wrong step can be retraced; a rhythm that failed to emerge can be sought anew. A mistake need not immediately become the work's conclusion, still less a conclusion about the person.
Yet the same phrase can gradually become heavier. It may no longer mean only that an action can be improved. It can also mean: you have not committed enough, you have not been sincere enough, you have not yet handed over your real self. The next attempt becomes not an opportunity but a deadline for continuing to prove yourself.
My question about Shoot Self with You begins here: when rehearsal asks for “once again,” is it asking for a more precise action, a more effective performance, or an inner state sufficient to prove that a real encounter has taken place?
These are not the same question.
Actions can be practiced, performances can be assessed, and inner states can be affected by situations, imagination, and training. But having a feeling does not mean being able to produce it on demand. Producing it does not mean that another person will experience it in the same way. Even if both people are moved, their being moved does not in itself make powerful cinema.
I do not intend to use this distinction to celebrate freedom and condemn control. The harder questions are these: why do some constraints give people the capacity to act, while some forms of openness leave them at a loss? Why does repeating the same words sometimes make a partner's voice clearer, yet at other times leave an actor hearing only a self that keeps asking, “Am I doing well enough?”
My contention is that repetition changes not only proficiency in an action, but also what participants can notice, what they can respond to, and what they regard as a problem they can address together next.
2. From Intimacies to P4: a connection that stylistic resemblance alone cannot explain
In “Shoot Self with You D | Once Again,” published on 24 August 2023, Yun Jianhui records a specific process: He Fa had already spoken in 2022 about studying Ryusuke Hamaguchi; when Shoot Self with You began in 2023, its early crew continued to study Intimacies; in July of that year, dialogue from Intimacies was incorporated into the script. This establishes, at a minimum, a line of learning supported by contemporaneous writing, rather than merely a formal resemblance noticed by later critics.[1]
But one can learn different things from a film.
One can study its extended duration, nonprofessional acting, and relational uncertainty. One can also study how it establishes the conditions in which those things can happen. The former are relatively easy to recognize; the latter often remain hidden in the time before the film is finished.
In a 2021 interview, Hamaguchi recalled that Intimacies emerged from an acting course at ENBU. Through sustained work with the students, he discovered abilities that a first impression alone would not have revealed. Later, the listening-centered workshops for Happy Hour also produced close relationships among participants. His understanding of these experiences was that some things happen only with time.[2]
This is not a law stating that the longer people stay together, the better their relationships must become. What I read in it is that a director's own understanding needs time to change. Rehearsal serves not only to discover what actors have not yet managed to do, but also to discover what the director did not previously know they could do.
Two different conceptions of time are at stake.
One treats the future as the realization of an existing intention: I already know what I want; now I need only wait for you to achieve it.
The other allows the future to revise the intention: I have a clear direction for the work, but working with you may reveal that my original goal was not precise enough.
These are not moral camps that can be assigned according to directors' names. A single director, a single project, even a single run-through may move between them. What needs comparing is not who is kinder, but this: when the actual response differs from the expected one, who is changed by the next attempt?
3. Diderot's counterquestion: why must the actor really suffer?
To discuss rehearsal and the real, we must first dismantle a remarkably tenacious equation: the more intensely an actor feels, the more truthful the performance; the more truthful the performance, the more powerful the art.
In Paradoxe sur le comédien (The Paradox of Acting), Diderot provocatively opposes this equation. Emphasizing observation, judgment, memory, and repeatable form, he questions whether actors who rely entirely on immediate feeling can perform a role consistently. He also describes actors continuing to listen to, observe, and adjust themselves while moving an audience. His argument clearly distinguishes the emotions actors undergo from the effects spectators receive.[3]
We need not accept the extreme proposition that great actors must have no feeling. But we must confront the gap it opens: what happens inside an actor does not correspond one-to-one with what the work produces for an audience.
A real tear can have no force in a film. A trained pause can make an audience feel something unbearable. Physiological authenticity grants the former no aesthetic exemption; deliberate design does not deprive the latter of the possibility of approaching experience.
Asking someone genuinely to fall into a character's predicament is therefore not the inevitable route to an effective performance. A character can take shape through observation, imagination, rhythm, voice, and concrete collaboration between partners. Art does not always have to reproduce the suffering it portrays before it can make that suffering perceptible.
Yet Diderot also presents an objection to this essay.
If excellent actors can perform while clearly observing their own voices and gestures, then “paying attention to oneself” is plainly not always an obstacle to acting. We cannot equate all self-observation with anxiety, or all immersion in a partner with freedom.
The necessary distinction is between technical self-calibration and judgment of the whole self.
The former asks: did this pause give the other person time? Was this line heard? Did this movement connect with the rhythm of the scene? It concerns specific work that can be discussed, adjusted, and tested.
The latter asks: do I have no talent at all? Am I insufficiently sincere? Am I worth being needed by these people? It escalates a particular performance into a judgment of the entire person, while the criteria may remain unclear throughout.
The danger of rehearsal is not that actors become aware that they are performing, but that they increasingly cannot distinguish a shortcoming in a performance from a shortcoming in their own existence.
This distinction frees us from a romantic fantasy: forget technique, forget the camera, forget yourself, and the real will arrive naturally. Self-forgetfulness is not the only route. The question is what kind of attention makes action more precise, and what kind repeatedly interrupts it with judgments of the person.
4. Hamaguchi's repetition: training changes how language enters the body instead of reproducing emotion
In a 2018 interview, Hamaguchi explained that he has actors read a text repeatedly, trying not to add emotional variations or intonational choices in advance. He moves to filming when he hears the words acquire a certain weight in the voice, as though the actors have absorbed them. During the shoot, how actors use the now-familiar text and respond to one another is not entirely determined by a fixed emotional version established in rehearsal.[4]
The easiest misunderstanding of this method is to summarize it as “mechanical repetition naturally produces the real.” That retains the fantasy of automatic conversion, as if enough readings must turn a text into life.
A more useful understanding is that repetition makes some aspects of the work relatively stable, allowing others to open up again.
When an actor is still searching for the next line, language is first of all a task of remembering. Once the words are familiar, the actor may become more attentive to how a partner speaks this time, whether they hesitate, where they place an emphasis, and how these changes affect the actor's next line.
This is an account of how the method might work, not a conclusion from an untested psychological experiment. It does not mean that every actor will reach the same state. It identifies a direction for analysis: by stabilizing one level, training can release room for variation at another.
Control and freedom are thus not always opposite ends of the same axis. A text can be highly fixed without fixing the response. An action can have strict boundaries while the attention and feelings within it still vary.
What needs resisting is not preparation itself, but preparation that has already sealed off the question of what can count as an effective response.
Hamaguchi's method nevertheless retains a power of judgment. It is still the director who decides when language has been sufficiently absorbed and when filming can begin. The weight of a voice is not an indicator that everyone can mechanically verify. Different actors may experience rigorous training as either support or constraint.
We therefore cannot treat this method as P4's moral opposite. It does not offer a situation without power, but a way of using power worth comparing: is the director willing to let preparation lead toward an expression not yet fully known, or will the director accept only results that confirm prior expectations?
5. “I love you” did not become a lie; its use as an action changed
A transcript excerpt of the opening of Shoot Self with You on P4's website presents a sequence worth close reading: a meeting, a request that they must meet, a refusal to continue being tormented, a declaration of love, and then Zichou's negative assessments of the performance, including “the acting is terrible” and “wrong.” What can be analyzed here is the layering of speech organized by the finished film. The judgments heard in the film cannot simply be equated with the totality of the actual production process.[5]
This is usually understood as a play-within-a-play being exposed: what we have just seen was not love after all, but the performance of love.
I think the decisive shift, however, is not that a sentence turns from true to false. It is that the sentence is submitted to several different judgments at once.
As words between characters, it may be an attempt to stop someone leaving. As an action between an actor and a partner, it needs to offer something to which the other person can respond next. As the result of rehearsal, it awaits assessment. As a sound in a film, it awaits an audience's understanding.
The same “I love you” therefore addresses, simultaneously, the character's addressee, the acting partner, the evaluator, and the film audience. Effectiveness on one level does not guarantee effectiveness on another.
A character's rejection of a declaration of love can be a successful dramatic action. Giving that refusal force does not mean that the actor is rejecting the partner in real life. A director-character's rejection of a performance changes how viewers understand the preceding words, but cannot automatically prove the actor's own feelings false.
The complexity of rehearsal lies in the fact that these levels can neither be completely isolated nor directly collapsed into one.
If a performance is rejected, on the next attempt the actor remembers not only the lines but also how they were heard the previous time. The second attempt is therefore no simple repetition of the first. The previous assessment becomes a condition of what follows.
In “Signature Event Context,” Derrida's discussion of iterability points out that a sign can be quoted, leave its original situation, and continue to function in a new one. This possibility is not an accidental contamination of language, but one of the conditions that enable language to operate. His criticism of Austin's provisional exclusion of theatrical language likewise concerns the relation between quotation and ordinary speech, which cannot be severed absolutely.[6]
Bringing this question back to rehearsal yields a specific proposition: a sentence can be spoken again, but the relations in which it is spoken do not automatically return to their former state.
When the same words are spoken a second time, they already carry a history of interruption, assessment, or rejection. Repetition preserves the recognizability of the words while changing the action they perform.
Rehearsal is therefore not only an attempt to reduce the difference between the first and second runs. It inevitably produces differences too. The question is whether those differences become something participants can recognize together, or are merely required to disappear.
6. A scene can be reset; a relationship cannot be returned to zero
“Once again” usually assumes that we can return to a starting point. Actors take their places again, props return to their positions, the lights come back up, and the dialogue starts from the beginning.
But not everything can return.
Who was heard in the previous run and who was rejected, who felt they had finally found the action and who felt their effort received no response: all of these may become conditions of the next run. We need not assume in advance that such changes must exist, still less invent the psychology of particular participants. But no study can presume that the history of a relationship is erased simply because a scene has been reset.
Rehearsal thus contains two different kinds of time.
One is the repeatable time of form: the same action can begin again, and the same line can be spoken again.
The other is relational time, which cannot simply be undone: participants have already lived through the preceding attempt together, and that experience may enter the present as memory, familiarity, trust, fatigue, or disagreement.
To say that relational time cannot be reset to zero is not to say that damage must accumulate. Familiarity accumulates too; laughter and tacit understanding also change the next run. It means only that repetition never encounters exactly the same conditions.
This is why “the same method worked yesterday but not today” cannot immediately be explained as an actor's decline. Attention may have changed; the task may already have been mastered; a previously useful instruction may now be obstructing action.
An experienced director should mean more than someone with a larger stock of reusable instructions. It should also mean someone able to recognize when a once-effective instruction no longer suits the present relationship.
Judgment in rehearsal involves not only asking whether an actor has achieved something, but also whether it is still worth asking for it in this way on this occasion.
P4's 2023 account of its creative process included fluid roles and responsibilities, everyday conversation entering the work, and the rebuilding of trust and connection within its methodological aspirations. Precisely because its expectations for rehearsal extend to relationships themselves, this time that cannot be reset is especially important to the analysis.[7]
A failed performance can be attempted again. But what has already arisen within a relationship cannot all be canceled by saying “that was only rehearsal.” Conversely, an unforeseen change in a relationship may give a predesigned scene a force that was never anticipated.
7. “Be more natural”: how a demand for freedom becomes another performance task
Imagine two directing notes. These are examples devised to distinguish mechanisms, not accounts of a particular P4 rehearsal.
The first is: “Wait until the other person finishes before you come in. Don't decide on the emotion yet; hear the last word before you act.”
The second is: “It's still not real enough. Commit more.”
The first is not inherently right, nor is the second necessarily ineffective. One actor may fully understand the second, abbreviated note. Another may become stiff because of the detailed specifications of the first.
The real difference is whether the note can become recognizable work within the present collaboration.
When both people can translate “more real” into what a sentence is doing, the object of an action, or a clear change in the relationship, the instruction can still work. When it means only approaching an ideal the director has not yet articulated, the actor may be unable to know what can actually change on the next run.
Failure then ceases to point toward conditions that can be revised, and can readily become an insufficiency of the entire person.
More dangerously, participants may begin constantly checking whether they are natural in order to satisfy the demand for naturalness. Every expression carries an additional task: proving that this time it has not been manufactured.
I call this possible process “the intensification of pressure for authenticity.” It is not the essence of all rigorous rehearsal, and a single reprimand is not enough to establish its presence. It describes a particular cycle: the creator demands a spontaneous response; participants monitor their expression to meet that demand; expression consequently becomes increasingly task-like; and the creator treats this sense of task-performance as evidence that the real has still not appeared.
The cycle is difficult to break because any outcome can be interpreted as participants having failed to commit sufficiently. The rule has no opportunity to fail; only the people keep failing.
Yet “improvise freely” can produce the same problem. Without a workable point of support, participants can only guess what kind of freedom will be approved. The least specified situation can thus be filled with the most intricate self-restraint.
Instead of asking whether a creator exercises control, ask: when a response falls short of expectations, are the conditions allowed to change, or must it always be the participants who change?
This is an important dividing line between generative rehearsal and the extraction of authenticity.
8. Playing a role is not the opposite of living; it may be a way into a relationship
P4's particular difficulty also arises because rehearsal concerns more than how a job is completed.
In an article written before the performance, Sun Jiarui describes both an estrangement from his own image on screen and role-playing as a way to enter Beijing's social world, meet others, and become friends. For him, a role is not only an artistic task to fulfill but also a route into relationships. This is his own account and should not be expanded into an experience shared by every participant.[8]
Yet it is enough to unsettle the explanation that taking off a mask will reveal the real.
Sometimes people do not first gain full acceptance and then decide whether to perform. They may, precisely, become needed through performing, and gradually gain relationships that exceed the task.
A role can therefore constrain someone while also giving them a position they did not previously have. Abolishing the role entirely does not necessarily restore freedom. It may remove the point of support from which the person can, for the moment, act.
“Once again” consequently acquires another possible weight. It can be heard as work continuing, but also as: we still need you; you still have a place in this shared activity.
Refusing another attempt may likewise, in some circumstances, be understood by those involved not simply as refusing an action but as withdrawing from a way of being together. We cannot infer coercion directly from a personal account, but we need to acknowledge that artistic tasks and relational belonging can become entangled.
This is why I am unwilling to classify P4 readily as either “a community that liberates people” or “an apparatus that uses them.” A role may initially make someone freer and subsequently become the only way they know to be needed. A sincere shared wish may also make it increasingly difficult for everyone to acknowledge that they do not wish to continue at this moment.
What deserves analysis is when this transformation happens, rather than assigning the entire institution an unchanging moral essence.
The generative capacity of a role as a passage ultimately depends on whether it allows participants to move beyond their original use. Can a person stop providing the same kind of performance and still exist as someone able to raise questions, change goals, and influence the work?
This does not turn rehearsal into psychotherapy. It puts the performance task back into the interpersonal structure in which it actually takes place, instead of treating actors as material that can be restarted at any moment.
9. The white-cloth ending: a plan is not the enemy of contingency
The white-cloth ending of The Last Rehearsal provides a counterexample that “openness is better than control” cannot readily explain.
According to Sun Jiarui's post-performance account, the latter part of the performance returned to blocking that had been agreed beforehand: participants were covered with cloth and moved toward the rear of the stage, creating the effect that the people onstage had disappeared. During the exit, Amon asked a further question beyond the scripted dialogue. Sun Jiarui could not determine whether his answer was intended to end the performance or arose because the question had touched something important to him.[9]
At least three different facts are present: the action had been arranged; the language departed from the plan; and the participant remained uncertain about the meaning of that departure.
If we celebrate only the unplanned question, the arranged action becomes a mere shell preceding the arrival of the real. Yet without the act of disappearance already being carried out, a question about leaving might not have had the same specificity.
If we emphasize only the planned blocking, we absorb the unexpected words back into an effect already possessed by the director.
A more precise understanding is that form first established a shared direction of action, and a response arising within that action then changed what the direction meant.
Planning and emergence are therefore not mutually exclusive. Certain stable conditions can instead enable participants to bring in an action or question that has not been written in advance. People do not have to reinvent the entire scene every second for a new response to become possible.
Equally important, however, the new response did not automatically yield a clear answer.
We cannot declare that an improvised remark has at last exposed a person's true inner self simply because it seems powerful. The uncertainty in the account should remain: a single answer can simultaneously serve to finish a performance, respond to a partner, and handle an experience unexpectedly touched upon.
Real experience does not have to be correctly interpreted at once in order to occur.
This directly challenges an excessively acquisitive artistic expectation: not only must something happen, but we must immediately know what it means. Emergence may first reveal the inadequacy of an existing understanding, rather than the completion of a new one.
What rehearsal can cultivate, then, may be less the ability to produce ultimate truth on the spot than the capacity to keep acting when an existing form is changed by another person.
10. Not “getting the emotion ready,” but making room to respond
After these comparisons, we can distinguish three tendencies within repetition.
Some repetition serves reproduction, enabling actions, voices, and rhythms to be accomplished consistently. Some serves familiarity, so that people need not devote all their attention to solving technical tasks. Some begins to demand an outcome, requiring participants to supply emotions and meanings sufficient to confirm the creator's expectations.
These do not form a moral hierarchy. Precise reproduction can produce great acting; familiarity can become inertia; an intense emotional demand can also be willingly accepted by an actor and transformed effectively. The real distinction is whether each kind of repetition remains open to revision when faced with a particular response.
I call the resulting working condition “room to respond.” This is not another category claiming to encompass all art, but a description of a particular capacity: participants do not have to solve every problem at once, and may therefore notice differences as they occur and allow those differences to affect what happens next.
This room includes observing oneself as well as listening to others. An actor can know precisely where they stand and how their voice carries, while still not having decided what the other person's next sentence must mean.
Diderot helps us retain the necessity of technique and judgment; Hamaguchi's method suggests that preparation need not culminate in reproducing a predetermined emotion. The two need not be forced into agreement: the former places greater emphasis on stable standards of performance, while the latter's relevant accounts emphasize the emergence of particular responses after preparation of the text.[3][4]
P4's question lies within a different tension: when relationships themselves become a creative objective, who can decide that a response is enough? Will the real that the work seeks keep exceeding the action the actor has already accomplished, continuing to demand something the actor cannot yet give?
The answer cannot be decided in advance by being “stricter” or “freer.”
The most creative use of iterability is not to guarantee the same feeling each time. It is to give people a point from which they can begin again without predetermining every difference that must appear next time.
11. From rehearsal to cinema: something real happened, and that is still not enough
At this point we must also resist an inference too favorable to P4: because rehearsal formed actual relationships, the film is already important.
That does not follow.
A scene's significance to its participants and its effect on viewers after entering a film are measured differently. Waiting in rehearsal may be a necessary process; the same duration in the finished film must still justify its formal function. Conversely, a pause not considered important at the time may, within the relations of sound and image, become a key to the whole film.
The generation of relationships must therefore undergo a translation into images. Framing determines which bodies are seen together; sound recording determines which reactions reach the audience; editing determines how the previous attempt remains within the next; duration determines whether we can experience a difference rather than merely be told it exists.
If a film retains only the most moving attempt, rehearsal may remain a condition of production hidden behind the finished work. If it organizes the relations among different attempts, viewers can watch “how effective performance takes shape” or “why completing an action has still not resolved the problem.”
But retaining multiple attempts is not sufficient either. Continuous recording can keep making a file longer without making relationships more legible. If three repetitions convey only the same judgment, extended duration may mean that the material has not yet been selected. If the third suddenly gives the first two a different meaning, it is organizing time.
“Failure is the subject” cannot therefore exempt a film from the possibility of failure. Representing ineffective action does not make every ineffective passage formally necessary.
I would rather assess Shoot Self with You in these terms: it deserves serious study not because it films rehearsal for long enough, but because it makes it possible to ask how performance, judgment, relational desires, and cinematic form change one another. Whether every passage fully realizes that possibility requires judgment passage by passage; no overarching concept can grant it all at once.
The force of a film that generates relationships lies not in proving how deeply people once committed themselves, but in making the workings, deviations, and failures of that commitment into a form that can be experienced.
Conclusion: the next attempt can be prepared, but not possessed
“Once again” remains one of art's most precious utterances.
It refuses to turn a first failure into a permanent fate, allowing people to seek their voices, actions, and ways of being together anew. Without that possibility of another attempt, many forms of expression could not even begin.
Yet it should not carry a hidden demand: now that we have invested so much, next time you ought to deliver something real that proves it was all worthwhile.
This is where the absence of a guarantee discussed in this essay arises. Art can reliably arrange certain conditions, train specific capacities, and help people enter experiences previously unavailable to them. But it cannot automatically deduce from those capacities how another person will respond, still less declare that only the expected response counts as something actually happening.
This is not a defense of being at a loss. The less conditions can guarantee an outcome, the more precisely a creator must judge what is being asked for. The absence of a guarantee cancels an omnipotent expectation of another person's inner life; it does not cancel the responsibility to analyze actions, voices, structures, and consequences.
To assess whether a form of rehearsal remains generative, therefore, we cannot ask only how intense a state it produces in people. We should ask instead: can what actually happened on the previous run change the conditions of the next? Can the director revise the original goal? Can the actors give the rules new meaning? Can the work accommodate outcomes that fail to meet expectations yet are genuinely worth watching?
While such change remains possible, repetition does not copy a completed answer. It renews the possibility of an encounter within finite form.
When every condition is fixed and only the participants are required to go deeper, be more authentic, and commit more, repetition gradually becomes an impossible task of self-proof.
What I believe is most worth continuing in P4 is not taking people to the attempt they can no longer endure. It is enabling one attempt genuinely to change everyone's understanding of rehearsal, including that of the person who says “once again.”
You can ask for an action to be done again. You cannot ask a person to happen again in the same way.
The significance of rehearsal is not finally to tame this difference, but to learn to keep creating within it.
References and source materials
[1] Yun Jianhui, “Shoot Self with You D | Once Again,” P4 Theater, 24 August 2023. https://p4theater.cn/articles/2023/2023-08-24-人类投降派-D-再来一次-316626b0ea/
[2] Aiko Masubuchi, “There Are Things That Occur Only With Time: An Interview with Ryusuke Hamaguchi,” Screen Slate, December 1, 2021. https://www.screenslate.com/articles/ryusuke-hamaguchi-interview-drive-my-car-wheel-fortune-fantasy
[3] Denis Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien. This essay refers to the French text available on Wikisource. https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Paradoxe_sur_le_com%C3%A9dien
[4] Jordan Cronk, “Cannes Interview: Ryusuke Hamaguchi,” Film Comment, May–June 2018. https://www.filmcomment.com/interview-ryusuke-hamaguchi/
[5] P4 Theater, “Shoot Self with You: A ‘Masterpiece’ as Live Divination,” 9 May 2026. This essay uses only the excerpt of the opening dialogue, without adopting the value judgment in that article's title. The excerpt does not stand in for a judgment of the actual production process. https://p4theater.cn/articles/2026/2026-05-09-人类投降派-作为现场占卜的-神作-5c300b2da7/
[6] Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” translated by Alan Bass, in Margins of Philosophy. This essay refers to the English text hosted on a Stanford University course website. https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Derrida/Derrida_Signature_Event.html
[7] He Fa, “Public Art Performance | Shoot Self with You, from Beginning to End: Will the Aliens Descend Again?”, P4 Theater, 18 August 2023. 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/
[8] Sun Jiarui, “Shoot Self with You | This Is the Last Rehearsal! It's Real! All of It Is Real!”, P4 Theater, 19 August 2023. 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/
[9] Sun Jiarui, “Shoot Self with You | I Disappeared: After Performing The Last Rehearsal,” P4 Theater, 2 September 2023. 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/
Written on 8 October 2026. This is the first standalone essay in the Relational Image Theory series.
Website supplement: chapter material navigation
Materials and original sources
- Shoot Self with You — P4 Theater, project entry
This series follows the complete Chinese manuscripts dated 8 October 2026. The text retains the original scope of its sources and the limits placed on its accounts of theory. The editorial series navigation is not part of the original manuscript.
Webpage: https://p4theater.cn/knowledge/relational-image-again/