英文摘要 |
The paper proposes to look at the epistolary voice-over in the movie Cape No.7 (2008) as a cinematic arrangement for the director to analyze and potentially rewrite the memory of Taiwan's colonized past. Accidentally sent, the letter parcel is at once the record of a quasi-native informant during the Japanese Occupation and a sign of silence-an erased history due to political and cultural reasons. Borrowing the languages of psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, I want to answer the questions of silence inherent in Cape No.7: Why is it that the letters in the movie are never sent or perhaps can never be sent? What does this lack mean? What is the ethical dimension of silence? What is it about the epistolary genre that serves to bring out the kind of subversive elements in the movie? Careful examinations of the movie suggest that a connection between the cinematic arrangements and the epistolary qualities shared by the eighteenth century epistolary novels can be established. For one thing, the parallel plots continue to resemble each other, making it difficult to tell one from the other-a quintessential move employed by epistolary fiction writers in the eighteenth century to blur the boundaries between the letter correspondences. But more importantly, what seems to be lacking in the letters some sixty years ago would soon turn topsy-turvy: the old letters have new addressees, the unfulfilled love has a new ending, the unresolved history now has new twists, and etc. In this way, the epistolary voice-over is no longer just a narrative and cinematic ploy; it in fact speaks to a kind of cultural sensitivity in the present that longs to uncover the many faces of its repressed past with sophistication. |