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."
Laurel and Hardy
In 1929 the silent era of film was coming to an end, and many actors saw their careers decline with the advent of sound. Many silent film actors failed to make the transition because they decided their prime duty was to tell stories in words or they overemphasized their speech. Laurel and Hardy avoided this pitfall because they continued making primarily visual films. They did not ignore sound but were not ruled by it. As a team they proved skilful in their melding of visual and verbal humor and made a seamless transition to the talking era in their first sound film "Unaccustomed As We Are" from 1929. The title took its name from the familiar phrase "Unaccustomed as we are to public speaking". In the opening dialogue, Laurel and Hardy began by spoofing the slow and self-conscious speech of the early talking actors which became a routine they would use regularly.