Bright Lights, Big City: Lighting, Technological Modernity, and Ozu Yasujirô's Sono Yo No Tsuma (That Night's Wife, 1930)

Abstract

Sono yo no tsuma (That Night's Wife), Ozu Yasujirô's 1930 film, embodied the contradictory discourses of technological modernity in Japan in 1930. The content of the film makes critical comments on the politics and economy of modernizing Japan as a cause of social distress. At the same time, stylistically, the film celebrates, or at least fully appreciates, the arrival of technological modernity by 1930, which enables the spectacles of lights in the form of a new visual medium for a mass-consumer society. Moreover, the motif of hands, which is enhanced by hard lighting throughout the film, positions Sono yo no tsuma at an intersection of technologies of criminal investigation and the modern anxiety and subjectivity of the period. Focusing on the use of lighting, in particular, I argue that the materiality of Sono yo no tsuma deviates from the simple dichotomy of East/West or the geopolitical hierarchy and structural hegemony of center/periphery and places itself in the sensory network of global film culture of the historical point of 1930.

Thinking from the Yamanote: space, place and mobility in Tokyo's past and present

“…These examples show that alongside its geographic qualities exists a 'Tokyo of the mind, an idea (or many ideas), a phenomenon and a world city that begs interpretation' (Yiu 2006b, p. 291). This 'Tokyo of the mind' is also suggested in other scholars' work on the image of Tokyo, such as in Daisuke Miyao's exploration of how Tokyo's shift to modernity is visually portrayed in Ozu Yasujiro's Sono yo no tsuma (That Night's Wife 1930) (Miyao 2014).…”