This dissertation examines music's role in cinema in the early years of synchronized sound film in the United States and France. Working against the historical and technological determinism that often plagues narratives of the transition to sound, I investigate the myriad ways in which directors, producers, and composers approached the new technology. Films acted as artistic manifestoes on the new technology and its aesthetic potential as filmmakers experimented with the musical soundtrack. Through multi-site archival research and close analyses of films and their music, I point to the heterogeneity of film music practices during synchronized sound's nascent years, considering early sound films as sites of aesthetic contestation and negotiation. / Music

For many years, theorists have turned to popular movies and books to help interpret the difficult principles of Jacques Lacan. However, one story that has gotten very little attention is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and its derivative body of film adaptations. Both the novella and Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 film are a small part of an intertextual body of work which contains scenes that play out the Lacanian principles of the mirror stage and the gaze very well. Since art imitates life, an in depth exploration of the way that these scenes play out can illuminate how Lacan’s abstract theories might look in the real life formation of identity and in male/female relations.