Abstract

This thesis examines the relationship between Hollywood’s transition to synchronized sound and the rise of the industry’s self-censorship practices, processes which were precisely commensurate during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Through nuanced historiographical discussion, this thesis explores how the transition to sound interfaced with other mechanisms at work in the Hollywood industry of the late 1920s—namely, regulatory discourses and practices. Both of these processes represent crucial shifts in the technologies, practices, and politics of Hollywood filmmaking. This thesis proposes that this coalescence produced compelling negotiations visible in the films of that era. Synchronized sound film is defined as part of a broader web of emergent sound media which, as Steve Wurtzler (2007) argues, interfaced with pre-existing concerns surrounding technologically mediated modernity and its effects on traditional morality. The study is illustrated by discussion of two part-talkie films of the flapper cycle, Our Dancing Daughters (1928) and Our Modern Maidens (1929) both of which negotiate a new technological terrain and indicate Hollywood’s ongoing negotiations with contemporaneous film-morality debates.