ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses Art Deco’s manifestation in cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s through a focus on the style’s sonic aspects. It provides an aspect of cinema’s affiliation with Deco that has received little attention: the style’s association with a particular sort of sonic experience. It explains examples drawn from the domain of cinema illustrate some ways in which Art Deco involved not only a specific look, but acoustic properties linked to the electric-sound media of the interwar decades, and sound cinema especially. The chapter deals with a few remarks on the relevance of modern acoustics to what Michael Windover describes as the cosmopolitan appeal of the Art Deco movie theater. Allusions to the modern sound that Thompson describes permeate films associated with the Art Deco aesthetic. The chapter describes the sonic dimension of Art Deco’s manifestation in film representation and style.
