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."
Filmmaking technique of Luis Buñuel
Buñuel has been hailed as a pioneer of the sound film, with "L'Age d'Or" being cited as one of the first innovative uses of sound in French film. Film scholar Linda Williams has pointed out that Buñuel used sounds, including music, as nonsynchronous counterpoint to the visual image, rather than redundant accompaniment, in accordance with theories that had been advanced by Sergei Eisenstein and others in a 1928 manifesto on the sound film. Critic Marsha Kinder has posited that Buñuel's years as a film dubber in Europe and Hollywood put him in the position of "mastering the conventions of film sound, to subvert them more effectively". In his later years, Buñuel was almost completely deaf, but he continued to assert control over the sound effects in his films, such as "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie", in which seemingly important speech, especially political discourse, is often drowned out by the noise of urban life, in such a systematic manner that Kinder has identified Buñuel as one of the first professional sound designers in cinema. As further illustration of this, scholar Sally Faulkner has described the means by which, in his film "Tristana", Buñuel "engineers a kind of figurative deafness, or disability, in the spectator" in scenes which involve deaf characters, by, for example, combining the sound of gushing water with an image of a stagnant pool, or exaggerating the volume level of chiming bells.