Over the past century, the rate of modernization has exponentially increased. From technological innovation to cultural shifts, the collective human experience has rapidly transformed. As a medium of expression, cinema has responded effectively to these changes by documenting the impacts of the evolving modern world. Film scholar Miriam Hansen’s modernity theory is manifested in creative innovations that visually showcase new technologies and respond to societal attitudes of the times. While Ozu’s That Night’s Wife and Capra’s Why We Fight incorporate the “effects of modernity” by utilizing industrial innovations in electrical lighting and film, Capra’s It Happened One Night responds to social sentiments by reflecting a censored film industry
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Before the film was made 1930, Tokyo had still been recovering from the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, which significantly set Japan back in urban modernization (164). Thus, when That Night’s Wife was created in 1930, the prevalence of electrical lighting was not only useful for stylistic purposes, but also represented the Japanese people celebrating the benefits of recovery and technological modernization. Film scholar Daisuke Miyao analyzes this celebration, detailing how electrical lighting technology allows Ozu to show Hashizume during chase scenes and is also prominently featured in cutaways to Hashizume’s brightly lit apartment and several electrical streetlights (171). At the same time, Miyao also notes that lighting is used to appraise modern Japanese sociopolitics in a time of anxiety. Since Japan was experiencing a financial crisis, viewers would sympathize with Hashizume, who robs a bank because he is too poor to afford medicine for his dying daughter. During the chase scene, Hashizume is brightly illuminated despite constantly trying to hide in the dark, representing how he cannot escape surveillance from the policemen. As agents of the state, the policemen are painted as obstacles hounding upon a more sympathetic figure. This suggest that with modernizing technology, constant …show more content…
By 1943, movies were a part of the mainstream American lifestyle. In line with Vertov’s “kino-eye” theory, Americans expected every part of human existence to be documented by the camera. People especially craved the drama that World War II entailed because war has an “invaluable dramatic superiority” as the intersection of “history and cinema,” as film scholar Andre Bazin notes (60). Thus, many directors embraced the effects of cinema becoming part of daily life by creating modern warfare films, which were also very relevant to the time period. Capra’s Why We Fight was especially original in the way it was composed as the first “edited ideological documentary” (Bazin 61). Unlike other directors at the time, Capra chose to use a didactic voiceover to link found footage from other films, including Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and various newsreels. The artistic choice to use found footage created a sense of “truth value” when painting a narrative, which worked well in Why We Fight because the film’s purpose was to inform the American public why the US was focusing on Germany after the Japanese had attacked. Since people were already well versed in the language of cinema, they were unlikely to believe in a film with staged acting as truth. However, the tone of
Before the film was made 1930, Tokyo had still been recovering from the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, which significantly set Japan back in urban modernization (164). Thus, when That Night’s Wife was created in 1930, the prevalence of electrical lighting was not only useful for stylistic purposes, but also represented the Japanese people celebrating the benefits of recovery and technological modernization. Film scholar Daisuke Miyao analyzes this celebration, detailing how electrical lighting technology allows Ozu to show Hashizume during chase scenes and is also prominently featured in cutaways to Hashizume’s brightly lit apartment and several electrical streetlights (171). At the same time, Miyao also notes that lighting is used to appraise modern Japanese sociopolitics in a time of anxiety. Since Japan was experiencing a financial crisis, viewers would sympathize with Hashizume, who robs a bank because he is too poor to afford medicine for his dying daughter. During the chase scene, Hashizume is brightly illuminated despite constantly trying to hide in the dark, representing how he cannot escape surveillance from the policemen. As agents of the state, the policemen are painted as obstacles hounding upon a more sympathetic figure. This suggest that with modernizing technology, constant …show more content…
By 1943, movies were a part of the mainstream American lifestyle. In line with Vertov’s “kino-eye” theory, Americans expected every part of human existence to be documented by the camera. People especially craved the drama that World War II entailed because war has an “invaluable dramatic superiority” as the intersection of “history and cinema,” as film scholar Andre Bazin notes (60). Thus, many directors embraced the effects of cinema becoming part of daily life by creating modern warfare films, which were also very relevant to the time period. Capra’s Why We Fight was especially original in the way it was composed as the first “edited ideological documentary” (Bazin 61). Unlike other directors at the time, Capra chose to use a didactic voiceover to link found footage from other films, including Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and various newsreels. The artistic choice to use found footage created a sense of “truth value” when painting a narrative, which worked well in Why We Fight because the film’s purpose was to inform the American public why the US was focusing on Germany after the Japanese had attacked. Since people were already well versed in the language of cinema, they were unlikely to believe in a film with staged acting as truth. However, the tone of