Camera Works
In Chapter Three, North considers "Close Up", the European film magazine published in Switzerland "with the more-or-less constant assistance of H.D." from 1927 to 1933. Noting the "considerable convergence of the literary world and the no longer quite so new medium of the movies" by 1927, North furthers his examination of international modernism's struggle with sound by pursuing the introduction of sound technology into silent cinema as a revealing moment in the history of globalization. Hollywood's attempts to cope with "the foreign problem", or that 9/10 of the world's population in 1927 did not speak English, often by shooting films in five different languages, are contrasted with utopian strategies advanced by the avant-garde that attempted to bring about an international film culture of the future based on global multilingualism or even Esperanto. In Chapter Two, North argued that sound came just as critics were raising silent film to the status of art, and here he shows how these two instances of perceived contamination, sound as intruder into the autonomous visuality of film and sound as divisive force in the international medium of the eye, often inflected or contradicted one another in the pages of the magazine. North concludes by stating: ""Close Up" registers an awareness in modernism of the strangeness opened up within ordinary experience by the new media, which, instead of establishing a new universal language, had exposed the inherent unfamiliarity of languages long in use."
Sound film
One of the first commercial films to take full advantage of the new opportunities provided by recorded sound was "Le Million", directed by René Clair and produced by Tobis's French division. Premiering in Paris in April 1931 and New York a month later, the picture was both a critical and popular success. A musical comedy with a barebones plot, it is memorable for its formal accomplishments, in particular, its emphatically artificial treatment of sound. As described by scholar Donald Crafton,