The Incompleteness of Empathy
Written by Wu Yu-Hsuan
Translated by Hsu Chun-Yi
In this program, an act recurs across all four films: a zookeeper cleaning an elephant’s feet over the fence; a group of young women, once strangers, bringing hand warmers and supplies, heading to the locked down Namtaeryeong; a high school girl, reading aloud to her classmates a passage about illegal abortion by Annie Ernaux; a group of architecture students, pulling a prank to disrupt a foregone conclusion in a friend’s final design crit.
The four acts are one and the same—a continuous movement toward the Other, which the protagonists do not yet fully understand, but already influences their lives.
None of the acts, however, has truly reached its ultimate resolution: the animals do not forget the violence they received, solely because humans stop using violence; farmers at Namtaeryeong and the youth who rush to the scene, do not eliminate the generational and class divides between them, simply because they spend a night resisting violence together; students who read Annie Ernaux, ultimately sees their parents in the text, rather than Ernaux; even if the friends successfully disrupt one design crit, they struggle to gain institutional recognition for another way of thinking.
Therefore, the four films share a more honest stance: understanding may never be completed, yet the act of approaching remains worthwhile.
The real danger is not failing to understand, but the completion of understanding. For once it is completed, we stop approaching another living being. What follows is no longer the journey toward them, but labeling, speaking on their behalf, and dictating their lives—for I know who you are, I understand your pain, I know what is best for you, and therefore, I begin to explain and answer for you.
Collective Monologue does not rush to prove that humans and animals finally understand each other. Conversely, the film devotes a large portion of its runtime to waiting. Brooms once used to drive away animals remain in the same place, yet are never wielded again; humans reach out their hands, yet must wait for another living being to decide, by its own, whether to approach. What truly changes is not that animals suddenly trust humans, but that one body’s anticipation of another gradually softens over time. Trust is not a declaration, but waiting.
The same theme is explored in The Longest Night: Namtaeryeong. The collective is not mobilized by a powerful slogan. A social media post, a box of supplies, a drive, a light stick, and the words “I’ll stand by you until dawn”—only when they all come together can they gradually form an unignorable square. Democracy is not a noun denoting a finished state, but a verb describing an ongoing process—sharing power banks, handing out blankets, or checking if those beside you are still holding up. A collective does not form by declaration, but by labor—labor that must be put into practice repeatedly. Once we stop repeating the labor, the collective starts to crumble.
In Writing Life—Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students, reading becomes another way of approaching the Other. Students do not truly understand Ernaux just by reading her work. Instead, by following her words, they revisit their own families, languages, and bodies. Literature has provided a circuitous way for otherwise unspoken life experiences to slowly resurface. It does not eliminate differences; rather, it creates a space where differences can be felt.
The film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones turns the act of approaching into a partiality. The School of Architecture believes that everyone should receive critiques under the same standard; however, Annie’s friends reject such fairness. They find him a place to sleep, provide him cigarettes, help him figure out how to graduate, and even plan a prank on the day of critique. None of those can help Annie graduate, nor prove his ideas are more valid than the system itself. What his friends protected is not his work, but his life yet to be defined. They are not asking the system to reevaluate Annie; they simply do not want the system to pass final judgment on him so quickly.
How can we still approach the Other without truly arriving at the Other? The four films provide different answers. One grounds its collective in waiting, another in repetitive labor, a third in the mediation of literature, and the last in partiality. They are not consistent, and even modify each other. Even so, a true collective is not the one where everyone follows the same approach. It is the one that consists of different people, who, in their own ways, refuse to give up on the Other too soon.
Consequently, the four films do not oversimplify the system as an enemy that needs to be overthrown immediately. The zoo still controls another species in the name of caretaking; the police still stand in front of the barricades; the classroom still maintains the power dynamic between teacher and student; the School of Architecture still decides who can graduate. Those films do not pretend to view the system from the outside. Instead, they keep asking one question: when people cannot change the system right away, can they still change their approach to the Other?
The four films also unveil a cruel hierarchy of “whose voice matters”. The Longest Night: Namtaeryeong questions who qualifies as a political subject. Those young women—originally dismissed as mere fangirls or mindless consumers of pop culture—do not give up their own languages. Rather, they bring light sticks, memes, and fandom cultures to the square, reshaping political languages. In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones asks who qualifies to be recognized by the system. Any idea that cannot be translated into professional architectural drawings is swiftly dismissed as naïve and flawed; without his friends’ constant involvement, his thoughts would not even have a chance to survive. Writing Life—Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students further shifts the focus to the act of reading itself: students do not speak directly of their lived experiences. Rather, through Annie Ernaux’s words, they at last find a language that can enter the classroom. Collective Monologue pushes this struggle for a voice to the extreme—animals never have a chance to speak for themselves. Their bodies, cries, flinching, and silence—all must first be observed and named by humans before acquiring any comprehensible meaning.
Consequently, true power does not reside solely with the police, the professors, or the zookeepers. The film itself also decides—who can speak, who deserves to be heard, whose silence remains silence, and whose life ultimately survives on screen. This is the inescapable condition of filmmaking; every frame is a choice, and every choice simultaneously excludes another possibility.
What is truly incomplete, perhaps, is not the understanding, but the empathy itself. Empathy is not about finally understanding you, nor about speaking on your behalf, let alone claiming your position as my own. Rather, it is about drawing close enough to no longer pretend your existence is irrelevant to mine; yet remaining far enough away, without presuming to interpret your silence.
