At night, Tokyo’s urban density creates an interplay of artificial lighting and shadow, which can lend an air of mystery to any subject. The kojo moe movement, for example, focuses simply on factories, power plants, and refineries that are lit dramatically at night, reimagining industrial structures through the lens of the sublime. When combined with transient urban scenes such as empty hotel rooms and evening commutes, noir aesthetics are elevated to a backdrop for poetic vignettes of urban solitude. These are times and places of limbo, when people are in transit between the social narratives that define them, and are presented with an opportunity for moments of quiet introspection and anagnorisis.
Antonio Sant’Elia, an Italian futurist architect, is best known for his visionary drawings of the Città Nuova (New City), created in the early 20th century. Though he never realised these plans in built form, his radical visions of towering, mechanised urban landscapes left a lasting impact on cinematic design. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), a cornerstone of neo-noir, draws heavily on Sant’Elia’s aesthetic, using monolithic megastructures in its cityscapes. This architectural style is one of raw materiality, geometric abstraction, and monumental scale—qualities that evoke both awe and alienation. Labyrinthine in their concrete contortions, they are suggestive of societies dominated by systems, not individuals - perfect for narratives of dystopian disillusionment. Shimmering in the heat of the day, they evoke the paintings of one of Antonio Sant’Elia’s contemporaries, Giorgio de Chirico, whose empty arcades and lengthening shadows created an atmosphere of unease.
Parallels are often drawn between the noir aesthetic and the work of Edward Hopper: his paintings of figures in illuminated windows at dusk are suggestive of urban loneliness and emotional distance. Hopper’s themes were echoed in the 35mm American street photography of the following decades, particularly that of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, which shares deep parallels with the noir aesthetic, despite their association with colour and Americana rather than the shadowy black-and-white world of classic film noir. Like Edward Hopper, Shore and Eggleston capture the uncanny in the ordinary—the quiet strangeness of empty streets, gas stations, motels, and diners. These settings, though bathed in daylight or rendered in vivid colour, evoke the same sense of alienation, ambiguity, and emotional dislocation that defines noir. The parallels lie in mood, not genre. Like noir, the following images invite close observation of light, shadow, and texture. Taking plastic as a leitmotif, they interrogate what lies beneath the surfaces of throwaway consumerism and suburban domesticity.
KOMOREBI
