title: The Camera Is Not a Window but an Address

category: English essays

series: English essays

sourceStatus: published

editionNote: 本文为研究档案公开版，保留来源版本的论述与限制。公开时间：2026-09-07；不表示已完成同行评审。

markdown:
# The Camera Is Not a Window but an Address

本文为研究档案公开版，保留来源版本的论述与限制。公开时间：2026-09-07；不表示已完成同行评审。

来源版本日期：2026-07-14

证据边界：This is a source-faithful English public essay. Film-specific claims follow T0/T1 role and speaker locks; theoretical claims are paraphrases unless explicitly identified as terms; no unverified page-number claim, private-psychology inference, consent ruling, or real-person identity inference is introduced.

# The Camera Is Not a Window but an Address

## Rethinking the Late Spectator in *Human Surrender*, from Bazin to Schneider

**By He Fa**

This is an essay about photography, specters, sound, performance, and the spectator who arrives late. It places *Human Surrender* (*Shoot Self with You*) in conversation with André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Vivian Sobchack, Michel Chion, and Rebecca Schneider. But it does not treat the film as an illustration of their theories.

![A layered reflected interior from Human Surrender, with a reclining body, architectural reflections, and the camera surface occupying the same image.](/research/images/0891a5e81169e6b5b568.webp)

*Human Surrender / Shoot Self with You. Film still courtesy of P4 Theater.*

## 1. Theory Is an Interface, Not a Master

*Human Surrender* could easily be swallowed by theory.

It has handheld images, a rehearsal space, a theatrical structure, and ambiguous questions directed toward the camera and people beyond the frame. Sound and image repeatedly slip out of alignment; the credits overlay the event with a new order of names. Almost any mature body of film theory could step forward and claim a part of it. Bazin could speak of photography preserving reality. Barthes could find the mortal wound of the photographic *punctum*. Derrida could name the specter and the archive. Sobchack could describe embodied spectatorship. Chion could show how sound reorganizes the image. Schneider could identify the remains of performance.

Yet an essay that merely allocates one part of the film to each thinker would miss the most dangerous thing about it.

The film does not simply put theoretical propositions on screen. At the junction of filming, performance, sound, archive, and spectatorship, it poses a harder question: when an event is still unfolding but photography has already handed it over to a future spectator, what exactly is that future spectator?

Is this figure simply an audience member who arrives later? A reader of the archive? A theorist? Or has a bodiless and unauthorized but already effective “you” flowed backward into the event from the beginning?

I call this position the **ownerless second-person address**.

“Ownerless” does not mean that the film lacks an address. The address is intensely present. Again and again, the film calls forth a “you.” Someone questions a person behind the camera. The pressure of being watched alters someone’s actions. Sound pulls an offscreen event into the visible one. The credits send a future reader searching for correspondences between bodies and names.

But this “you” cannot be assigned securely to any owner. At one moment it resembles a character; at another, the camera, the camera operator, a future spectator, an archive, or a researcher. It is summoned and it exerts real force upon the event, yet no one can possess it.

> **The camera is not a window but an address.**
> A window lets us imagine that we stand outside and look in. An address means that, while the event is happening, it has already written a late-arriving “you” into itself.

This is why the six theorists gathered here should not be treated as six parallel footnotes. They mark six thresholds in a single chain of problems. The image preserves reality; preservation carries mortality; mortality disrupts time through specters and archives; the spectator must enter that disruption bodily; sound makes the entry exceed the frame; performance leaves the disruption behind.

What emerges is not a sum of theories but a genealogy of the late spectator, moving from photographic trace to second-person address.

![Audience members and performers occupy the same translucent performance environment in Human Surrender.](https://p4theater.top/assets/shoot-self-with-you/photos/shoot-self-with-you-still-11-court-audience-wide.jpg)

*The audience and the performance zone occupy one shared field. The film never grants the viewer a clean seat outside the event. Film still courtesy of P4 Theater.*

## 2. Bazin: From “Once Present” to “Will Have Been Seen”

The importance of Bazin’s photographic ontology lies not in the simple assertion that photography is more realistic than painting. It lies in his account of photography as a mechanical trace left by reality.

The photographic image and the photographed object enter a causal relation: the object was before the lens, and light traveled from it to a photosensitive surface or recording apparatus. A painting may resemble its subject with extraordinary precision, but it remains a handmade reconstruction. Photography, at least in its basic structure, temporarily withdraws the interpreter’s hand and allows reality to enter the image through an automatic process.

This is why Bazin connects photography to mummies, portraits, and the ancient impulse to preserve the body. Human beings fear time and death, and so invent forms that might preserve existence.

For Bazin, cinema also preserves duration. Movement, space, environment, and temporal relation unfold together rather than being frozen in a single instant. Hence his commitment to the long take, deep focus, and mise-en-scène: these forms need not hurry to cut reality into one meaning. They can let several bodies, directions, and moral possibilities coexist within a common space and time.

The ethics of the long take is not the crude proposition that fewer cuts are always better. It lies in the willingness, sometimes, to confront a reality that interpretation has not yet exhausted.

*Human Surrender* can certainly be approached in these terms. It preserves rehearsal, pauses, bodily hesitation, offscreen pressure, and sonic residue. It does not rush to edit the event into a smoothly consumable story. Many passages seem less interested in explaining what happened than in retaining the state of something still occurring, not yet reducible to an account.

But to call this only a Bazinian preservation of reality would stop too soon.

The film’s more radical gesture is not merely that reality leaves a trace. From the outset, the trace is organized for a spectator who has not yet arrived.

Photography here is not a window. It is an address.

The logic of the window assumes that the spectator stands outside and the lens grants a view within. The logic of the address says something different: in the moment of filming, photography has already inscribed a future recipient into the event. That recipient is absent, yet already participates as the pressure of someone who will watch, preserve, misunderstand, and watch again.

Bazin’s proposition is: **This happened here.**

*Human Surrender* rewrites it: **Here, it will already have been seen by someone who arrived late.**

This is not a grammatical trick. The tense has changed. Traditional photographic ontology emphasizes the past: the image proves that its object existed. *Human Surrender* pushes photography into the future perfect. The event is occurring, but it already occurs under the condition of a future look.

The long take, too, becomes more than a humble preservation of reality. It limits the spectator’s permissions. You may enter, but only by this path. You may rewatch, but you may not invent the second camera you were never given. You may remain with the image, but you may not confuse duration with the resurrection of the event.

Bazin’s ethics of leaving reality open becomes, here, an ethics of keeping the spectator constrained.

## 3. Barthes: The *Punctum* as the Discovery That the Late Spectator Was Expected

In *Camera Lucida*, Barthes develops several concepts that have since become fixtures of writing about photography.

The *studium* names the level of a photograph available to cultural, historical, political, and intellectual reading. It allows us to recognize an era, an institution, a taste, or a social setting.

The *punctum* is different. It is the detail that suddenly pierces the spectator. It need not be grand, nor need it have been deliberately arranged as the photographer’s subject. It may be a hand, a gesture, a fold in a piece of clothing, an averted gaze. The *punctum* is not something we calmly extract from the photograph. It wounds us in return.

Barthes’s other decisive formula is the *that-has-been*: a photograph tells its spectator that the photographed person really stood there. Photography therefore bears an inescapable mortality. Even if the subject was alive when the shutter opened, in the act of viewing they have already become a figure of the past—someone who will die or has died, someone preserved as an image-specter.

Barthes calls the photographed subject the *spectrum*. The term already carries its ghostly charge. Once a person enters a photograph, they become an image-being available to the future spectator’s gaze, misrecognition, preservation, and mourning.

*Human Surrender* has puncta in this sense. The white fabric, a pause, a gaze searching for its addressee, the silence after a question, the unstable correspondence between names in the credits and bodies still visible behind them: any of these may inflict an unpredictable pain upon a particular spectator.

But to reduce the *punctum* to a “moving detail” would still be too narrow.

The film advances Barthes by moving the puncture from the interior of the image to the position of the spectator. The spectator does not merely look at an object in the past and find one detail that wounds them. The spectator discovers that the past event seems to have reserved a place for their own late arrival.

This makes the film’s mortality more complicated than ordinary photographic deathliness.

That deathliness usually proceeds from the knowledge that “this person was alive and has now entered the past.” Here it also arises from a more uncomfortable realization: I, the later spectator, did not arrive before the image as an innocent observer. My look may already have been anticipated by the event, prepared by the apparatus, and summoned by its sounds and credits.

The punctum is no longer simply “that detail belongs to the past.” It is this: **I, the future spectator, somehow belong to it as well.**

I thought I was looking at an event that had ended. Instead, I find that the event, while it was still happening, posted an unstable address to me.

> Barthes says: **This has been.**
> *Human Surrender* adds: **The spectator who had not yet arrived had already been awaited.**

Barthes’s *that-has-been* therefore needs another formula beside it: the **who-has-not-yet-arrived**.

Photography not only tells us that someone was there. It produces someone who has yet to arrive. This future figure is not an authorized master but a late recipient. They receive images, sounds, names, and remains, but cannot turn receipt into possession.

The Barthesian *punctum* becomes an ethics of spectatorship. What it pierces is not merely my feeling but my sovereignty as a viewer.

## 4. Derrida: The Specter Is Not the Return of the Dead but the Backflow of a Future Look

Hauntology is often reduced to the claim that the past refuses to die. This is not wholly wrong, but it makes the specter sound too much like a dead person, a vanished age, or repressed history returning.

What matters more in Derrida’s *Specters of Marx* is temporal disjunction. The present is never a clean present. It is split by unfinished pasts, futures yet to come, debts, mourning, and the obligations of inheritance. The specter is neither fully present nor fully absent. It demands a response but cannot be stabilized as an object we simply identify.

*Archive Fever* moves the problem into institutions of preservation. The archive is not a neutral warehouse. It is an architecture of address, power, and interpretation. Who may preserve? Who may name? Who may retrieve? Who may place material into public memory, and who remains outside the record? None of these are merely technical questions. The archive appears to face the past, but it continually manufactures a future, because future readers will reorganize the past through what the archive allows them to see.

The relation between *Human Surrender* and Derrida cannot stop at the claims that “the film is ghostly” or “the credits form an archive.”

Its spectrality is not a supernatural motif, the appearance of the dead, or an old event returning. It arises when a future spectator is summoned in advance by the past. During filming, that spectator is absent. Yet the camera, second-person questions, sonic residues, credits, and archival overlays already let the future position exert force.

The specter is therefore not simply someone dead who returns. It is someone not yet arrived who has already begun to alter the present.

This is why the archival layer of *Human Surrender* cannot be understood as closure. The credits, job titles, acknowledgments, and institutional marks seem to file the event, giving creation, performance, production, and spectatorship a legible order. Yet background bodies, indistinct spaces, residual sounds, and gaps beyond the list continue to insist that placing an archive over an event is not the same as conquering it.

The more the archive names, the more it exposes what cannot be fully named. The more it preserves, the more it reveals preservation’s limit. The more people it places on a list, the more clearly we sense that certain bodies, relations, and acts of waiting cannot be removed from the event and safely stored there.

Derrida offers not a ready-made conclusion but a methodological vigilance.

We cannot turn *Human Surrender* into an object “finally archived” by theory. The film places the researcher within archive fever as well. We rewatch, capture frames, catalogue, interpret, and write. These are not pristine actions performed outside the event.

They continue its desire to archive and must accept the limit the film imposes: preservation is not settlement; interpretation is not inheritance; research is not ownership.

## 5. Sobchack: Embodied Spectatorship as a Constrained Body on Loan

Vivian Sobchack’s film phenomenology resists treating cinema as a purely visual object. It also resists treating the spectator as a passive receiver wholly manipulated by an apparatus.

For Sobchack, cinema happens between bodies. A film has its own manner of perceiving, moving, and expressing—a body of its own—while the spectator experiences the image through another body. We do not watch with the eyes alone. Orientation, breathing, muscular memory, tactile imagination, spatial tension, and bodily boundaries all participate.

This is crucial to *Human Surrender*, because its spectatorship is never purely optical.

Handheld movement, proximity, wide angles, waiting, hesitation, obstruction, low positions, and the felt presence of breath prevent us from occupying an all-knowing point of view. The lens is not a transparent conduit but something like a body on loan. It has distance and weight. It startles. It fails to see everything at once.

Entering the film does not grant the spectator a god’s-eye view. It means temporarily using this constrained body.

Here, however, the film also compels a revision of Sobchack. Embodied spectatorship can too easily be mistaken for deeper immersion, as though the more bodily our response becomes, the farther we enter the event and the closer we come to its truth.

In *Human Surrender*, the opposite is true. Embodiment does not let the spectator possess the event. It lets the spectator discover that possession is impossible.

The handheld camera does not grant you a stable “I.” It lends a provisional body capable of leaving itself, being misaddressed, and becoming visible to others. The wide angle does not allow you to see more and therefore master more. It prevents you from extracting a person cleanly from environment, edge, third position, and material circumstance. The long take is not immersive continuity; it locks you into a path you cannot skip.

I call this revision **constrained borrowed-body spectatorship**.

Borrowed-body spectatorship is not point of view. Point of view usually says: you are now seeing what a character sees. Borrowed-body spectatorship says: this look has borrowed a body, but there is no guarantee that the look belongs to it. The body may resemble that of a character, a camera operator, or a future spectator, then suddenly expose its inability to belong anywhere at all.

That instability is the condition under which the second-person address emerges. The look first borrows a body, then discovers that the body is not its own, and finally returns as an “I” that has been seen but is no longer original to itself.

Sobchack teaches us that spectators do not watch from outside the body. *Human Surrender* teaches us that the body they borrow does not belong to them either.

Phenomenology becomes ethics: feeling the event does not mean owning it; bodily activation does not confer authorization; being called by the film does not make the spectator its master.

![A low-angle view of a performer and translucent stage material in Human Surrender.](https://p4theater.top/assets/shoot-self-with-you/photos/shoot-self-with-you-still-22-scar-real-director-angle.jpg)

*The camera is low, partial, and materially obstructed. It lends the spectator a position without turning that position into mastery. Film still courtesy of P4 Theater.*

## 6. Chion: Sound Does Not Supplement the Image. It Keeps the Event from Closing.

Michel Chion’s sound theory begins from a basic proposition: cinema is not image plus sound. Image and sound jointly produce a new perceptual whole.

Sound does not simply accompany an image. It changes what we see, how we judge space, and how we experience time and causality. Chion’s “added value” names the meaning, emotion, rhythm, weight, and direction that sound lends the image—qualities viewers may then imagine were already visible there.

“Synchresis” describes the rapid fusion of a sound and an image when they occur together, as spectators assume that both belong to one event. Concepts such as acousmatic and offscreen sound, and the centrality of the voice, likewise demonstrate sound’s capacity to reorder the visible.

Sound in *Human Surrender* cannot be reduced to music or effects. It operates as a mechanism of trespass.

The image appears to provide a boundary, but sound repeatedly invalidates it. Someone exists beyond the frame; the event has not fallen still. Low frequencies, friction, breath, material contact, vocal tails, and room tone keep the visible space from sealing itself. Often the image gives us only a partial body, an obstruction, a low position, or a still posture. Sound tells us that the event continues to move, that relations persist elsewhere, and that the spectator has not earned the right to announce an ending.

This is where the film pushes Chion further. *Audio-vision* tells us that cinematic perception is already audiovisual rather than an image later supplemented by sound. *Human Surrender* makes sound a relay for second-person address.

The voice does not always belong securely to someone, and the image cannot always reclaim it. A sentence, an intake of breath, a low-energy interval, or the contact of one material against another travels offscreen, behind the camera, and toward the future spectator. The image attempts to contain the event within visibility; sound leaves the door ajar.

Sound, then, does not simply make the image more real. It prevents the image from monopolizing reality.

It forces the spectator to concede that what can be seen is not the whole event, while what can be heard cannot be securely assigned. Sound draws me closer and simultaneously tells me that I have not arrived. It gives the future spectator an entrance but preserves uncertainty at the threshold.

The ethics of sound resembles the ethics of the photographic address: it summons you without authorizing you to close the case.

> Sound is not an accessory to the image.
> In *Human Surrender*, it preserves the event that the image failed to contain—and prevents hearing from becoming ownership.

In this sense, sound is almost an archive before the credits. It keeps what the image failed to contain: the wait after speech, the pressure that lingers after a body has left the space.

But this is not the clear preservation of a list of names. It is unstable preservation. It hands remains to the future spectator without converting those remains into complete facts.

Chion helps us understand how sound and image compose perception. *Human Surrender* shows how sound can also prevent perception from hardening into property.

## 7. Schneider: Performance Does Not Vanish, and Its Remains Can Begin in Advance

Performance studies has long asked what, if anything, remains when a performance is over.

Rebecca Schneider frames *Performing Remains* against an influential emphasis on performance’s presentness and disappearance. Her intervention does not turn performance into an ordinary durable object. It asks us to attend to bodily habits, gestures, reenactments, historical residues, traumatic repetitions, and failed attempts to recover an “original.”

That reversal is indispensable to *Human Surrender*.

The film is not simply a recording of a finished play, nor does it treat rehearsal as preparation for a definitive performance. It captures the mutual contamination of actor, character, rehearsal, spectatorship, and recording.

The film keeps actor, character, rehearsal, spectator, and recording in a visibly unstable relation. Performance cues, missed words, role slots, material actions, and the pressure of being watched are already reproducible before any single, definitive performance has been secured.

Performance remains do not begin after the performance. They begin in rehearsal.

The white-fabric passage at approximately 2:28:24–2:31:10 makes this especially clear, but more narrowly than a metaphor of an actor simply “leaving” a character would suggest. Large areas of white fabric or plastic obscure faces and bodies while the camera, audience, work area, and recording apparatus remain present. Ameng asks Jiarui whether he needs her to say the words for him; Jiarui answers, “Say it.” Ameng then delivers a first-person passage from the transferred speaking position. Later, Zichou describes the covered state as intensely safe; Ameng recasts that safety as “No one can see you” and as the absence of another person’s gaze. Zichou and Jiarui answer with brief confirmations at different points in the sequence.

Here **Ameng** is the in-scene name associated with Huang Meng / Role A; **Jiarui** is Sun Jiarui; and **Zichou** is the in-scene and project name associated with the credited performer Xu Shuai. I retain the in-scene names when describing the dialogue so that performer names, role slots, and speaking positions do not collapse into one another.

![White covering, audience, and bodies remain in one visible field as the speaking position is handed over in Human Surrender.](/research/images/d9a49e4850e315079baa.webp)

*At approximately 2:28:45, the line “Say it” occurs while the white covering and audience remain in the same visible field. The fabric changes the mode of visibility; it does not make the recorded body disappear. Film still courtesy of P4 Theater.*

This is neither a clean exit from character nor a simple authorization scene. It is a redistribution of speech and visibility under public recording: one person’s blankness is named by another, a one-word response transfers the speaking position, and material concealment becomes newly visible to the camera.

Schneider allows us to say that performance persists through remains rather than vanishing at its conclusion. *Human Surrender* moves the proposition one step earlier. The remains are not passively left behind after performance; the apparatus of photography, the anticipation of future spectators, and the desire to archive produce them while performance is still underway.

Every hesitation, missed word, wait, transfer of speech, and alteration of bodily visibility is already becoming something that can be watched again. Before performance has fully become itself, it has begun to lose itself. Before a role is stabilized, it has acquired an afterlife.

This is why the film’s “surrender” cannot be reduced to giving up.

Surrender, then, cannot be reduced to giving up. It names a redistribution: speech leaves one mouth and continues through another; visibility shifts from face to material surface; the archive later assigns names and functions without exhausting what the recorded event contains. No exit is total, because the image preserves the attempted shift and consigns it to a future spectator.

Performance studies now meets hauntology. The remains of performance are not merely remnants of the past. They are produced when future spectatorship enters performance in advance, giving performance its afterlife from the beginning.

## 8. Six Theoretical Lines Converge in the Ownerless Second-Person Address

We can now compress the six lines into one structure.

Bazin gives us the **trace**: the image preserves reality.

Barthes gives us the **wound**: what is preserved pierces the spectator through mortality.

Derrida gives us **disjointed time**: the wound belongs not to a simple past but to a present disturbed by specters and archives.

Sobchack gives us the **body**: the spectator is not an abstract mind but enters that disturbance bodily.

Chion gives us **trespass**: sound makes bodily entry exceed the frame.

Schneider gives us the **remains**: performance continues between disappearance and preservation.

*Human Surrender* does not add these six points together. It turns them all toward a problem of grammatical person.

Photography preserves an event, but not for a neutral eye: it preserves the event for a future “you.” The image wounds this “you,” because the spectator discovers that the past was already waiting for them. This “you” resembles a specter, absent but already affecting the present. It must borrow a body to see, but the borrowed body does not belong to it. Sound continues to summon it, but refuses to let it close the event. It faces the remains of performance, but those remains do not authorize it to resurrect or possess what occurred.

The **ownerless second-person address** can therefore be defined as follows:

> A cinematic address calls forth a “you,”
> lets that “you” exert real force within the event,
> yet refuses to let it settle securely in character, camera, spectator, archive, or critic.

The definition has three layers.

First, the “you” is called, so it is not nothing.

Second, the “you” has effects, so it is not merely an interpretive hallucination.

Third, the “you” cannot be assigned securely, so it is not another name for spectator sovereignty, character point of view, or authorial intention.

It is an effective but ownerless address.

This rearranges the six theoretical vocabularies. Bazin’s preservation of reality becomes the preservation of an address. Barthes’s *punctum* becomes the address piercing back. Derrida’s specter becomes the temporal disjunction of a future address. Sobchack’s body becomes a borrowed body for the address. Chion’s sound becomes its forwarding system. Schneider’s remains become the address’s afterlife.

The film does not simply ask, “Who is looking?” It asks: when a “you” has been called forth but cannot be returned to any stable owner, what form of responsibility remains possible for spectatorship?

## 9. Why This Is Not Simply Metacinema or a Rehearsal Documentary

A conservative response might be: isn’t this just metacinema?

The film exposes cameras, performers, a production team, and credits. The audience becomes conscious of watching a film.

Or: isn’t it simply a record of rehearsal?

The film retains the instability, trial and error, changing roles, and residues of a creative process.

Neither counterreading is entirely wrong. Both, however, return the problem too quickly to familiar categories.

Metacinema usually concerns the exposure of cinematic mechanisms and the spectator’s recognition that the medium is not transparent. *Human Surrender* certainly does this, but it goes further. Revealing the mechanism does not grant the spectator sovereignty over the truth.

Much metacinema gives the viewer a higher-order sense of mastery after the apparatus has been disclosed: I know this is a film; I understand how it manufactures illusion; therefore I am more lucid than an ordinary spectator.

*Human Surrender* refuses this reward.

After exposing camera, sound, performance, and archive, it does not hand the event to a cleverer viewer. It makes that viewer recognize themself as one more late arrival already caught inside the event.

Nor is “rehearsal documentary” enough.

The logic of documentation can imply that a process exists first and the camera records it second, enabling a later audience to see what happened. In *Human Surrender*, the camera never stands outside the process.

Rehearsal changes because it is filmed. Performance deforms under the anticipation of future viewing. Unassignable sounds push the event beyond itself. The credits attempt to preserve and thereby expose the failure of preservation.

There is no pristine “rehearsal itself” that precedes its recording. Rehearsal is entangled from the beginning with being watched, recorded, saved, and watched again.

The claim advanced here is narrower than “metacinema” and more exacting than “rehearsal documentary.” The film preinstalls a future spectator as one of the event’s conditions, then repeatedly limits that spectator’s sovereignty. The audience is summoned but not authorized. Theory is invited but cannot become master. The archive preserves the event but cannot settle it.

This limitation is the film’s central formal ethic.

## 10. Non-Sovereign Spectatorship: The Ethical Limit of the Theoretical Interface

If this essay had to be compressed into a single sentence, it would be this:

> *Human Surrender* transforms photography from a window that preserves the past into an address that summons the late spectator—and forces that spectator to learn non-sovereign viewing.

Non-sovereign spectatorship does not mean refusing to look. Nor is it opposed to theory, archives, or repeated viewing. It acknowledges that seeing, preserving, rescanning, and theorizing are unavoidable.

The question is whether these acts automatically become ownership.

An event entering an image does not mean that it belongs to the audience. A body entering the credits does not mean the archive has fully explained it. A performer’s distance from a role does not erase the role. Hearing a voice does not guarantee a stable source. Being wounded by a detail does not confer a right to possess it.

This is also the common boundary of the six theorists in this essay.

Bazin asks us to respect reality’s ambiguity; *Human Surrender* asks us to respect the limits imposed on future spectatorship.

Barthes shows how a photograph wounds its viewer; the film insists that pain grants no title of possession.

Derrida shows how archives remain open to the future; the film requires the archive to acknowledge its own boundary of failure.

Sobchack shows that viewing is embodied; the film asks the body not to confuse borrowing with ownership.

Chion shows how sound reorganizes the image; the film asks us not to mistake audiovisual fusion for a settled fact.

Schneider shows that performance remains; the film asks us not to confuse those remains with a recoverable original event.

The depth of *Human Surrender* lies not in its conformity to these theories but in its power to make them rewrite one another.

Photographic ontology must confront the future spectator. The *punctum* must confront the spectator’s own position. Hauntology must turn from the return of the dead toward the preinstallation of a future look. Film phenomenology must turn from embodied immersion toward a constrained body on loan. Sound theory must turn from audiovisual synthesis toward the impossibility of closing the event. Performance studies must turn from post-performance remains toward remains generated within rehearsal itself.

The six lines converge on one ethical proposition: after seeing, we still may not carry away the person, the event, the sound, the role, or the remains as property.

## Conclusion: Here, You Will Already Have Seen—but You Cannot Own Here

The fundamental tense of *Human Surrender* is not the past but the future perfect.

It does not say only, “This happened here,” or even, “This was recorded.” It says: while this was happening, it was already being handed to a late-arriving you; when you finally watch, it will already have been seen by you.

This “you” is not free. It is summoned by the photographic address, led in by sound, entangled in the remains of performance, assigned a reading by the archive, wounded by the *punctum*, and stopped at an ethical limit.

The film’s “human surrender” therefore becomes more than a theme, feeling, or posture. It marks the collapse of a regime of spectatorship. We can no longer pretend that looking permits ownership of its object, that preservation defeats time, that replay resurrects an event, or that theory can finish the film on its behalf.

Surrender is not defeat. It is the acknowledgment that visual sovereignty has failed.

Within that failure, the film opens a more difficult mode of witness. The late spectator must arrive, but the late spectator may not possess.

The six theorists gathered here are therefore not a map of external authority but a set of interfaces the film puts back into motion. Bazin lets us begin with the trace. Barthes makes us feel the trace as a mortal wound. Derrida shows how the wound becomes the disjointed time of specter and archive. Sobchack makes us concede that spectatorship requires a borrowed body. Chion lets us hear the event continuing outside the image. Schneider explains why performance does not disappear at its ending.

*Human Surrender* pushes every one of these interfaces in the same direction:

> **The image does not hand the past to an owner.**
> **It hands an ownerless “you” to the future.**
> **You have been addressed. You have not been licensed to possess.**

## A Guide to the Theoretical Transformations

- **Bazin’s photographic ontology:** Its original question is how photography preserves reality’s trace and duration. In *Human Surrender*, the question becomes how photography organizes the event in advance for a future spectator.

- **Barthes’s theory of photography:** Its original question is how the photograph wounds the spectator through the *that-has-been* and the *punctum*. In *Human Surrender*, the question becomes how the *punctum* lets the spectator discover that the event had already been waiting for them.

- **Derrida’s hauntology and theory of the archive:** Their original question is how pasts, traces, debts, and archives disturb the present. In *Human Surrender*, the question becomes how a future spectator flows backward into the filmed event before arriving.

- **Sobchack’s film phenomenology:** Its original question is how cinematic experience occurs bodily. In *Human Surrender*, the question becomes how a spectator borrows a constrained body that never becomes their own.

- **Chion’s sound theory:** Its original question is how sound reorganizes visual perception. In *Human Surrender*, the question becomes how sound prevents the image from closing the event and forwards the second-person address.

- **Schneider’s performance remains:** Its original question is how performance persists after its supposed disappearance. In *Human Surrender*, the question becomes how remains emerge in advance, during rehearsal and filming, and how a role acquires an afterlife.

## Citation Note

The theoretical language above is paraphrased for a public essay. Terms such as *studium*, *punctum*, *spectrum*, *that-has-been*, “added value,” and “synchresis” are identified as terms from the cited works; the bold propositions and tense formulas are my transformations of those theories, not quotations from Bazin, Barthes, Derrida, Sobchack, Chion, or Schneider. Because the essay does not reproduce a theorist’s sentence verbatim or attach a claim to a specific passage, it does not invent pinpoint page numbers. The page range in the Bazin entry is the article’s verified bibliographic range, not a fabricated pinpoint citation.

## Works Cited

- Bazin, André. “[The Ontology of the Photographic Image](https://doi.org/10.2307/1210183).” Translated by Hugh Gray. *Film Quarterly* 13, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 4–9.
- Bazin, André. [*What Is Cinema? Volume I*](https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520242272/what-is-cinema-volume-i). Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
- Barthes, Roland. [*Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography*](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374532338/cameralucida/). Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
- Derrida, Jacques. [*Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International*](https://www.routledge.com/Specters-of-Marx-The-State-of-the-Debt-the-Work-of-Mourning-and-the-New-International/Derrida/p/book/9781041083689). Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
- Derrida, Jacques. [*Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression*](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo27619045.html). Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
- Sobchack, Vivian. [*The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience*](https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691213279). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
- Sobchack, Vivian. [*Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture*](https://www.ucpress.edu/books/carnal-thoughts/epub-pdf). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
- Chion, Michel. [*Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen*](https://cup.columbia.edu/book/audio-vision-sound-on-screen/9780231185899/). Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
- Schneider, Rebecca. [*Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment*](https://www.routledge.com/Performing-Remains-Art-and-War-in-Times-of-Theatrical-Reenactment-1st/Schneider/p/book/9780203852873). London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

## Watch and Continue

- [Watch *Shoot Self with You / Human Surrender* on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/934438119).
- [Open the English film and project entry](https://p4theater.top/en/shoot-self-with-you/).
- [Explore the verified film-stills gallery](https://p4theater.top/en/shoot-self-with-you/photos/).
- [Read the key English essays on *Human Surrender*](https://p4theater.top/en/key-articles/#human-surrender).
- [Subscribe to P4 Theater on Substack](https://p4theater.substack.com/subscribe) for the next essay in this English series.

## Evidence Boundary

This essay offers a T3 theoretical reading of observable formal relations in *Human Surrender*: camera position, duration, offscreen sound, performance, the white-fabric sequence, and the credits. The scene names and speaking positions in the 2:28:24–2:31:10 passage follow the project’s T0 role lock and T1 local audio/frame/subtitle micro-account: Ameng asks, Jiarui says “Say it,” Ameng occupies the proxy-speaking position, and Zichou later describes and confirms the covered state. The brief confirmations are not treated as a ruling about private consent, coercion, or real-life intention. The essay does not claim access to participants’ private psychology, off-screen relationships, or a single definitive authorial intention. The theoretical references function as interfaces for reading the film, not as authorities that settle it.

headingPath: The Camera Is Not a Window but an Address

text: The Camera Is Not a Window but an Address

headingPath: Rethinking the Late Spectator in Human Surrender , from Bazin to Schneider

text: Rethinking the Late Spectator in Human Surrender , from Bazin to Schneider

text: By He Fa

text: This is an essay about photography, specters, sound, performance, and the spectator who arrives late. It places Human Surrender ( Shoot Self with You ) in conversation with André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Vivian Sobchack, Michel Chion, and Rebecca Schneider. But it does not treat the film as an illustration of their theories.

text: Human Surrender / Shoot Self with You. Film still courtesy of P4 Theater.

text: 1. Theory Is an Interface, Not a Master

text: Human Surrender could easily be swallowed by theory.

text: It has handheld images, a rehearsal space, a theatrical structure, and ambiguous questions directed toward the camera and people beyond the frame. Sound and image repeatedly slip out of alignment; the credits overlay the event with a new order of names. Almost any mature body of film theory could step forward and claim a part of it. Bazin could speak of photography preserving reality. Barthes could find the mortal wound of the photographic punctum . Derrida could name the specter and the archive. Sobchack could describe embodied spectatorship. Chion could show how sound reorganizes the image. Schneider could identify the remains of performance.

text: Yet an essay that merely allocates one part of the film to each thinker would miss the most dangerous thing about it.

text: Is this figure simply an audience member who arrives later? A reader of the archive? A theorist? Or has a bodiless and unauthorized but already effective “you” flowed backward into the event from the beginning?

text: I call this position the ownerless second-person address .

text: The camera is not a window but an address. A window lets us imagine that we stand outside and look in. An address means that, while the event is happening, it has already written a late-arriving “you” into itself.

text: What emerges is not a sum of theories but a genealogy of the late spectator, moving from photographic trace to second-person address.

text: The audience and the performance zone occupy one shared field. The film never grants the viewer a clean seat outside the event. Film still courtesy of P4 Theater.

headingPath: 2. Bazin: From “Once Present” to “Will Have Been Seen”

text: 2. Bazin: From “Once Present” to “Will Have Been Seen”

text: The importance of Bazin’s photographic ontology lies not in the simple assertion that photography is more realistic than painting. It lies in his account of photography as a mechanical trace left by reality.

text: This is why Bazin connects photography to mummies, portraits, and the ancient impulse to preserve the body. Human beings fear time and death, and so invent forms that might preserve existence.

text: The ethics of the long take is not the crude proposition that fewer cuts are always better. It lies in the willingness, sometimes, to confront a reality that interpretation has not yet exhausted.

text: Human Surrender can certainly be approached in these terms. It preserves rehearsal, pauses, bodily hesitation, offscreen pressure, and sonic residue. It does not rush to edit the event into a smoothly consumable story. Many passages seem less interested in explaining what happened than in retaining the state of something still occurring, not yet reducible to an account.

text: But to call this only a Bazinian preservation of reality would stop too soon.

text: The film’s more radical gesture is not merely that reality leaves a trace. From the outset, the trace is organized for a spectator who has not yet arrived.

text: Photography here is not a window. It is an address.

text: Bazin’s proposition is: This happened here.

text: Human Surrender rewrites it: Here, it will already have been seen by someone who arrived late.

text: This is not a grammatical trick. The tense has changed. Traditional photographic ontology emphasizes the past: the image proves that its object existed. Human Surrender pushes photography into the future perfect. The event is occurring, but it already occurs under the condition of a future look.

text: Bazin’s ethics of leaving reality open becomes, here, an ethics of keeping the spectator constrained.

headingPath: 3. Barthes: The Punctum as the Discovery That the Late Spectator Was Expected

text: 3. Barthes: The Punctum as the Discovery That the Late Spectator Was Expected

text: In Camera Lucida , Barthes develops several concepts that have since become fixtures of writing about photography.

text: The studium names the level of a photograph available to cultural, historical, political, and intellectual reading. It allows us to recognize an era, an institution, a taste, or a social setting.

text: The punctum is different. It is the detail that suddenly pierces the spectator. It need not be grand, nor need it have been deliberately arranged as the photographer’s subject. It may be a hand, a gesture, a fold in a piece of clothing, an averted gaze. The punctum is not something we calmly extract from the photograph. It wounds us in return.

text: Barthes’s other decisive formula is the that-has-been : a photograph tells its spectator that the photographed person really stood there. Photography therefore bears an inescapable mortality. Even if the subject was alive when the shutter opened, in the act of viewing they have already become a figure of the past—someone who will die or has died, someone preserved as an image-specter.

text: Barthes calls the photographed subject the spectrum . The term already carries its ghostly charge. Once a person enters a photograph, they become an image-being available to the future spectator’s gaze, misrecognition, preservation, and mourning.

text: Human Surrender has puncta in this sense. The white fabric, a pause, a gaze searching for its addressee, the silence after a question, the unstable correspondence between names in the credits and bodies still visible behind them: any of these may inflict an unpredictable pain upon a particular spectator.

text: But to reduce the punctum to a “moving detail” would still be too narrow.

text: This makes the film’s mortality more complicated than ordinary photographic deathliness.

text: The punctum is no longer simply “that detail belongs to the past.” It is this: I, the future spectator, somehow belong to it as well.

text: I thought I was looking at an event that had ended. Instead, I find that the event, while it was still happening, posted an unstable address to me.

text: Barthes says: This has been. Human Surrender adds: The spectator who had not yet arrived had already been awaited.

text: Barthes’s that-has-been therefore needs another formula beside it: the who-has-not-yet-arrived .

text: The Barthesian punctum becomes an ethics of spectatorship. What it pierces is not merely my feeling but my sovereignty as a viewer.

headingPath: 4. Derrida: The Specter Is Not the Return of the Dead but the Backflow of a Future Look

text: 4. Derrida: The Specter Is Not the Return of the Dead but the Backflow of a Future Look

text: Hauntology is often reduced to the claim that the past refuses to die. This is not wholly wrong, but it makes the specter sound too much like a dead person, a vanished age, or repressed history returning.

text: What matters more in Derrida’s Specters of Marx is temporal disjunction. The present is never a clean present. It is split by unfinished pasts, futures yet to come, debts, mourning, and the obligations of inheritance. The specter is neither fully present nor fully absent. It demands a response but cannot be stabilized as an object we simply identify.

text: Archive Fever moves the problem into institutions of preservation. The archive is not a neutral warehouse. It is an architecture of address, power, and interpretation. Who may preserve? Who may name? Who may retrieve? Who may place material into public memory, and who remains outside the record? None of these are merely technical questions. The archive appears to face the past, but it continually manufactures a future, because future readers will reorganize the past through what the archive allows them to see.

text: The relation between Human Surrender and Derrida cannot stop at the claims that “the film is ghostly” or “the credits form an archive.”

text: The specter is therefore not simply someone dead who returns. It is someone not yet arrived who has already begun to alter the present.

text: This is why the archival layer of Human Surrender cannot be understood as closure. The credits, job titles, acknowledgments, and institutional marks seem to file the event, giving creation, performance, production, and spectatorship a legible order. Yet background bodies, indistinct spaces, residual sounds, and gaps beyond the list continue to insist that placing an archive over an event is not the same as conquering it.

text: Derrida offers not a ready-made conclusion but a methodological vigilance.

text: We cannot turn Human Surrender into an object “finally archived” by theory. The film places the researcher within archive fever as well. We rewatch, capture frames, catalogue, interpret, and write. These are not pristine actions performed outside the event.

text: They continue its desire to archive and must accept the limit the film imposes: preservation is not settlement; interpretation is not inheritance; research is not ownership.

headingPath: 5. Sobchack: Embodied Spectatorship as a Constrained Body on Loan

text: 5. Sobchack: Embodied Spectatorship as a Constrained Body on Loan

text: Vivian Sobchack’s film phenomenology resists treating cinema as a purely visual object. It also resists treating the spectator as a passive receiver wholly manipulated by an apparatus.

text: This is crucial to Human Surrender , because its spectatorship is never purely optical.

text: Entering the film does not grant the spectator a god’s-eye view. It means temporarily using this constrained body.

text: In Human Surrender , the opposite is true. Embodiment does not let the spectator possess the event. It lets the spectator discover that possession is impossible.

text: I call this revision constrained borrowed-body spectatorship .

text: Sobchack teaches us that spectators do not watch from outside the body. Human Surrender teaches us that the body they borrow does not belong to them either.

text: Phenomenology becomes ethics: feeling the event does not mean owning it; bodily activation does not confer authorization; being called by the film does not make the spectator its master.

text: The camera is low, partial, and materially obstructed. It lends the spectator a position without turning that position into mastery. Film still courtesy of P4 Theater.

headingPath: 6. Chion: Sound Does Not Supplement the Image. It Keeps the Event from Closing.

text: 6. Chion: Sound Does Not Supplement the Image. It Keeps the Event from Closing.

text: Michel Chion’s sound theory begins from a basic proposition: cinema is not image plus sound. Image and sound jointly produce a new perceptual whole.

text: Sound in Human Surrender cannot be reduced to music or effects. It operates as a mechanism of trespass.

text: This is where the film pushes Chion further. Audio-vision tells us that cinematic perception is already audiovisual rather than an image later supplemented by sound. Human Surrender makes sound a relay for second-person address.

text: Sound, then, does not simply make the image more real. It prevents the image from monopolizing reality.

text: The ethics of sound resembles the ethics of the photographic address: it summons you without authorizing you to close the case.

text: Sound is not an accessory to the image. In Human Surrender , it preserves the event that the image failed to contain—and prevents hearing from becoming ownership.

text: In this sense, sound is almost an archive before the credits. It keeps what the image failed to contain: the wait after speech, the pressure that lingers after a body has left the space.

text: But this is not the clear preservation of a list of names. It is unstable preservation. It hands remains to the future spectator without converting those remains into complete facts.

text: Chion helps us understand how sound and image compose perception. Human Surrender shows how sound can also prevent perception from hardening into property.

headingPath: 7. Schneider: Performance Does Not Vanish, and Its Remains Can Begin in Advance

text: 7. Schneider: Performance Does Not Vanish, and Its Remains Can Begin in Advance

text: Performance studies has long asked what, if anything, remains when a performance is over.

text: Rebecca Schneider frames Performing Remains against an influential emphasis on performance’s presentness and disappearance. Her intervention does not turn performance into an ordinary durable object. It asks us to attend to bodily habits, gestures, reenactments, historical residues, traumatic repetitions, and failed attempts to recover an “original.”

text: That reversal is indispensable to Human Surrender .

text: Performance remains do not begin after the performance. They begin in rehearsal.

text: Here Ameng is the in-scene name associated with Huang Meng / Role A; Jiarui is Sun Jiarui; and Zichou is the in-scene and project name associated with the credited performer Xu Shuai. I retain the in-scene names when describing the dialogue so that performer names, role slots, and speaking positions do not collapse into one another.

text: Schneider allows us to say that performance persists through remains rather than vanishing at its conclusion. Human Surrender moves the proposition one step earlier. The remains are not passively left behind after performance; the apparatus of photography, the anticipation of future spectators, and the desire to archive produce them while performance is still underway.

text: This is why the film’s “surrender” cannot be reduced to giving up.

headingPath: 8. Six Theoretical Lines Converge in the Ownerless Second-Person Address

text: 8. Six Theoretical Lines Converge in the Ownerless Second-Person Address

text: We can now compress the six lines into one structure.

text: Bazin gives us the trace : the image preserves reality.

text: Barthes gives us the wound : what is preserved pierces the spectator through mortality.

text: Derrida gives us disjointed time : the wound belongs not to a simple past but to a present disturbed by specters and archives.

text: Sobchack gives us the body : the spectator is not an abstract mind but enters that disturbance bodily.

text: Chion gives us trespass : sound makes bodily entry exceed the frame.

text: Schneider gives us the remains : performance continues between disappearance and preservation.

text: Human Surrender does not add these six points together. It turns them all toward a problem of grammatical person.

text: The ownerless second-person address can therefore be defined as follows:

text: A cinematic address calls forth a “you,” lets that “you” exert real force within the event, yet refuses to let it settle securely in character, camera, spectator, archive, or critic.

text: The definition has three layers.

text: First, the “you” is called, so it is not nothing.

text: Second, the “you” has effects, so it is not merely an interpretive hallucination.

text: Third, the “you” cannot be assigned securely, so it is not another name for spectator sovereignty, character point of view, or authorial intention.

text: It is an effective but ownerless address.

text: This rearranges the six theoretical vocabularies. Bazin’s preservation of reality becomes the preservation of an address. Barthes’s punctum becomes the address piercing back. Derrida’s specter becomes the temporal disjunction of a future address. Sobchack’s body becomes a borrowed body for the address. Chion’s sound becomes its forwarding system. Schneider’s remains become the address’s afterlife.

text: The film does not simply ask, “Who is looking?” It asks: when a “you” has been called forth but cannot be returned to any stable owner, what form of responsibility remains possible for spectatorship?

headingPath: 9. Why This Is Not Simply Metacinema or a Rehearsal Documentary

text: 9. Why This Is Not Simply Metacinema or a Rehearsal Documentary

text: A conservative response might be: isn’t this just metacinema?

text: The film exposes cameras, performers, a production team, and credits. The audience becomes conscious of watching a film.

text: Or: isn’t it simply a record of rehearsal?

text: The film retains the instability, trial and error, changing roles, and residues of a creative process.

text: Neither counterreading is entirely wrong. Both, however, return the problem too quickly to familiar categories.

text: Metacinema usually concerns the exposure of cinematic mechanisms and the spectator’s recognition that the medium is not transparent. Human Surrender certainly does this, but it goes further. Revealing the mechanism does not grant the spectator sovereignty over the truth.

text: Much metacinema gives the viewer a higher-order sense of mastery after the apparatus has been disclosed: I know this is a film; I understand how it manufactures illusion; therefore I am more lucid than an ordinary spectator.

text: Human Surrender refuses this reward.

text: After exposing camera, sound, performance, and archive, it does not hand the event to a cleverer viewer. It makes that viewer recognize themself as one more late arrival already caught inside the event.

text: Nor is “rehearsal documentary” enough.

text: The logic of documentation can imply that a process exists first and the camera records it second, enabling a later audience to see what happened. In Human Surrender , the camera never stands outside the process.

text: There is no pristine “rehearsal itself” that precedes its recording. Rehearsal is entangled from the beginning with being watched, recorded, saved, and watched again.

text: This limitation is the film’s central formal ethic.

headingPath: 10. Non-Sovereign Spectatorship: The Ethical Limit of the Theoretical Interface

text: 10. Non-Sovereign Spectatorship: The Ethical Limit of the Theoretical Interface

text: If this essay had to be compressed into a single sentence, it would be this:

text: Human Surrender transforms photography from a window that preserves the past into an address that summons the late spectator—and forces that spectator to learn non-sovereign viewing.

text: Non-sovereign spectatorship does not mean refusing to look. Nor is it opposed to theory, archives, or repeated viewing. It acknowledges that seeing, preserving, rescanning, and theorizing are unavoidable.

text: The question is whether these acts automatically become ownership.

text: This is also the common boundary of the six theorists in this essay.

text: Bazin asks us to respect reality’s ambiguity; Human Surrender asks us to respect the limits imposed on future spectatorship.

text: Barthes shows how a photograph wounds its viewer; the film insists that pain grants no title of possession.

text: Derrida shows how archives remain open to the future; the film requires the archive to acknowledge its own boundary of failure.

text: Sobchack shows that viewing is embodied; the film asks the body not to confuse borrowing with ownership.

text: Chion shows how sound reorganizes the image; the film asks us not to mistake audiovisual fusion for a settled fact.

text: Schneider shows that performance remains; the film asks us not to confuse those remains with a recoverable original event.

text: The depth of Human Surrender lies not in its conformity to these theories but in its power to make them rewrite one another.

text: Photographic ontology must confront the future spectator. The punctum must confront the spectator’s own position. Hauntology must turn from the return of the dead toward the preinstallation of a future look. Film phenomenology must turn from embodied immersion toward a constrained body on loan. Sound theory must turn from audiovisual synthesis toward the impossibility of closing the event. Performance studies must turn from post-performance remains toward remains generated within rehearsal itself.

text: The six lines converge on one ethical proposition: after seeing, we still may not carry away the person, the event, the sound, the role, or the remains as property.

headingPath: Conclusion: Here, You Will Already Have Seen—but You Cannot Own Here

text: Conclusion: Here, You Will Already Have Seen—but You Cannot Own Here

text: The fundamental tense of Human Surrender is not the past but the future perfect.

text: It does not say only, “This happened here,” or even, “This was recorded.” It says: while this was happening, it was already being handed to a late-arriving you; when you finally watch, it will already have been seen by you.

text: This “you” is not free. It is summoned by the photographic address, led in by sound, entangled in the remains of performance, assigned a reading by the archive, wounded by the punctum , and stopped at an ethical limit.

text: Surrender is not defeat. It is the acknowledgment that visual sovereignty has failed.

text: Within that failure, the film opens a more difficult mode of witness. The late spectator must arrive, but the late spectator may not possess.

text: Human Surrender pushes every one of these interfaces in the same direction:

text: The image does not hand the past to an owner. It hands an ownerless “you” to the future. You have been addressed. You have not been licensed to possess.

headingPath: A Guide to the Theoretical Transformations

text: A Guide to the Theoretical Transformations

text: Bazin’s photographic ontology: Its original question is how photography preserves reality’s trace and duration. In Human Surrender , the question becomes how photography organizes the event in advance for a future spectator.

text: Barthes’s theory of photography: Its original question is how the photograph wounds the spectator through the that-has-been and the punctum . In Human Surrender , the question becomes how the punctum lets the spectator discover that the event had already been waiting for them.

text: Derrida’s hauntology and theory of the archive: Their original question is how pasts, traces, debts, and archives disturb the present. In Human Surrender , the question becomes how a future spectator flows backward into the filmed event before arriving.

text: Sobchack’s film phenomenology: Its original question is how cinematic experience occurs bodily. In Human Surrender , the question becomes how a spectator borrows a constrained body that never becomes their own.

text: Chion’s sound theory: Its original question is how sound reorganizes visual perception. In Human Surrender , the question becomes how sound prevents the image from closing the event and forwards the second-person address.

text: Schneider’s performance remains: Its original question is how performance persists after its supposed disappearance. In Human Surrender , the question becomes how remains emerge in advance, during rehearsal and filming, and how a role acquires an afterlife.

text: Citation Note

text: The theoretical language above is paraphrased for a public essay. Terms such as studium , punctum , spectrum , that-has-been , “added value,” and “synchresis” are identified as terms from the cited works; the bold propositions and tense formulas are my transformations of those theories, not quotations from Bazin, Barthes, Derrida, Sobchack, Chion, or Schneider. Because the essay does not reproduce a theorist’s sentence verbatim or attach a claim to a specific passage, it does not invent pinpoint page numbers. The page range in the Bazin entry is the article’s verified bibliographic range, not a fabricated pinpoint citation.

text: Works Cited

text: Bazin, André. “ The Ontology of the Photographic Image .” Translated by Hugh Gray. Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 4–9.

text: Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Volume I . Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

text: Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography . Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

text: Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International . Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.

text: Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression . Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

text: Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

text: Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

text: Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen . Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

text: Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment . London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

text: Watch and Continue

text: Watch Shoot Self with You / Human Surrender on Vimeo .

text: Open the English film and project entry .

text: Explore the verified film-stills gallery .

text: Read the key English essays on Human Surrender .

text: Subscribe to P4 Theater on Substack for the next essay in this English series.

text: Evidence Boundary

text: This essay offers a T3 theoretical reading of observable formal relations in Human Surrender : camera position, duration, offscreen sound, performance, the white-fabric sequence, and the credits. The scene names and speaking positions in the 2:28:24–2:31:10 passage follow the project’s T0 role lock and T1 local audio/frame/subtitle micro-account: Ameng asks, Jiarui says “Say it,” Ameng occupies the proxy-speaking position, and Zichou later describes and confirms the covered state. The brief confirmations are not treated as a ruling about private consent, coercion, or real-life intention. The essay does not claim access to participants’ private psychology, off-screen relationships, or a single definitive authorial intention. The theoretical references function as interfaces for reading the film, not as authorities that settle it.