英文摘要 |
This essay expounds the aesthetics and meanings of Scott Hicks's feature Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) by attending to criticisms on this film's slow pacing. First, I argue that it is not lengthy shots, motionless camera, lagging movement, or visual/aural minimalism that slows down Snow Falling on Cedars. The film feels slow because of the disintegration of its images and narrative, and the disconnection between its senses and plots. As the film's signifying structure falls apart, time drifts away and overflows. The second section analyzes sequences selected from Snow Falling on Cedars to reveal the incoherence and discontinuity of images and sounds, of reality and recollections. I argue that Hicks splits narrative and characters, thereby undermining spectators' screen identification and visual pleasure. The third section turns to trauma theory and contends that Snow Falling on Cedars is loaded with traumatic time. Filming death, wars, racial conflicts, and the forced relocation of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, Snow Falling on Cedars seeks in traumatic duration opportunities to explore and generate social logics and meanings. I conclude that Snow Falling on Cedars does not simply experiment with an aesthetic style of slowness; being slow is an ethical move to obtain the time needed for probing into self-other encounter, past-present convergence, and cross-racial communication. Snow Falling on Cedars ultimately introduces a vision in which the trauma of Second World War brings together people of different colors and the memory of mass relocation no longer belongs exclusively to or affects only Japanese Americans. |