Note: On 19, Feb 2004, an accident took away the French ethnographic director Jean Rouch. In the same year, Sing Song-yong made a special feature for Rouch. Besides from the translation of Marc Henri Piault's "Toward Ethical Films," Sing also wrote an article to pay his homage. In 2014, the 4th Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition exhibited Rouch's "Les Maîtres Fous" after ten years of his death. This leads us to think: Viewed in the context of video art, has the element of “fiction-alizing” in “Rouch’s ethnographic images has overflown from the definition of “the documentary and developed a more ambiguous sense? Additionally, the article reminds us how the strategies of transgression in film genres have been replaced in Taiwan and how we are to think over the dialectical relationship between the images and the representation of the subjects while reminiscening the past pioneers.
Jean Rouch, film frame from PAROLES; source: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jean_Rouch.jpg
Jean Rouch, Les Maîtres Fous, 1955; source: Taiwan Internation Video Art Exhibition 2014
Jean Rouch, Jaguar, 1967; youtube.com/watch?v=sXgPwQG_EKQ
Jean Rouch, Moi, Un Noir, 1958; youtube.com/watch?v=12nq75j-dqw
