“Should I Put Down the Camera?”

This chapter discusses a new development of documentary ethics in Taiwan’s documentary filmmaking. Starting out in close association with social movements in the mid-1980s, Taiwan’s new documentary was born in answer to the call to “give voice to the voiceless people.” ¹ Documentary ethics is often defined in terms of the representation of the oppressed, marginalized Other. But if documentary filmmaking is considered an ethical action, we see a more complicated expression of documentary ethics in some recent Taiwanese documentary films. Placing the main focus on the ethical relationship between the filmmaker and the filmed subjects, these films ask such troubling ethical questions about the act of documentary filmmaking that the raison d’être of the film is seriously undercut.