Though a wholly silent film, this melo­drama by Ozu sheds fascinating light on the intersections between sound and si­lent cinema in this period of transition. By 1933, nearly 40% of Japan’s theatres were wired for sound, and the number of sound films was steadily increasing, while foreign sound films had been steadily imported into Japan since around 1930. But it was not until 1935 that sound films would constitute the majority of Japanese film production. Accordingly, Japan’s late silent cinema constitutes a near-unique case of a silent film culture which was profoundly influenced by the techniques and styles of sound cinema.
Ozu was late turning to sound, but his last silent films clearly show the influ­ence of the new medium, particularly in their use of dialogue intertitles delivered by offscreen speakers, which seems to reflect the new possibilities of offscreen sound. A Woman of Tokyo itself was ap­parently planned as a sound film, but was eventually shot silent. Nevertheless, it was filmed on sound stock, and consequently the frame is narrower than the standard academy format, a fact which has led the image to be cropped when screened on DVD or video. This is particularly unfortu­nate since A Woman of Tokyo is the first Ozu film to display his characteristic low-angle shots. This screening at Bologna, of course, will preserve the original ratio.
The film is a bleak melodrama about a young man who receives financial sup­port for his studies from his sister, only to discover that she is engaging in prostitu­tion to do so. The plot echoes Mizoguchi’s melodramas, Taki no Shiraito (Cascading White Threads, 1933) and Orizuru Osen (The Downfall of Osen, 1934), but the poignant and tragic aspects of the narra­tive are offset by a playful stylistic self-consciousness and wit, at its most obvious when Ozu interpolates a comic sequence directed by Ernst Lubitsch from the Para­mount portmanteau film, If I Had a Million (1932). David Bordwell comments that Ozu “cites the norm he dislodges, but for the first time in a surviving work, he uses not movie posters and photographs, but actual footage […] Ozu’s playfulness re-emerges when he refuses to show Laugh­ton’s delivery of a raspberry to his boss. We must be cinephiles enough to fill in the gag’s payoff”. Bordwell might have added that the raspberry gag depends specifical­ly on sound for its humour, so its absence here is arguably a self-conscious commen­tary on the film’s status as a silent in a film world increasingly dominated by sound.