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."
Stefano Pittaluga
Pittaluga's power grew in 1926 when he acquired the traditional leading production outfit Cines from the conglomerate Unione Cinematografica Italiana. Following on the heels of the development of sound film in America, Britain and Germany, Pittaluga had the Cines Studios in Rome fitted for sound production. Cines produced the first Italian sound film "The Song of Love" (1930), although another of the company's films "Resurrection" (1931) was actually made earlier but released later. Cines became the dominant force of the early sound era.