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."
Economy of California
With Thomas Edison's invention of the Kinetoscope (early movie camera) in 1894, California would become a leader when "talkies" were introduced in the sound film movie industry. The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as film itself, but because of the technical challenges involved, synchronized dialogue was only made practical in the late 1920s with the perfection of the Audion amplifier tube and the introduction of the Vitaphone system. After the release of "The Jazz Singer" in 1927, "talkies" became more and more commonplace. Within a decade, popular widespread production of silent films had ceased. Cheap land, good year-round climate and large natural spaces prompted the growing film industry to begin migrating to Southern California in the early part of the 20th century. The film patent wars of the early 20th century actually led to the spread of film companies across the U.S. Many worked with equipment for which they did not own the patent rights, and thus filming in New York was "dangerous"; it was too close to Edison's company headquarters, and to his agents which the company sent out to seize "illegal" cameras. By 1912, most major film companies had set up movie production facilities in Southern California near or in Los Angeles because of the region's favorable year-round weather and the rapidly growing supply of "talent" both before and behind the cameras. Since the 1920s California continues to be a major U.S. center for motion-picture shows, television shows, cartoons, and related entertainment industries, especially in Hollywood and Burbank areas.