The Phantom of the Operator (2004) [N/A]
Featuring:
Pascale Montpetit, Helen, Louise
Written by:
Caroline Martel
Directed by:
Caroline Martel
Release Date:
September 12, 2004
Original Title:
Le fantôme de l'opératrice
Genres:
Documentary
Production Companies:
Artifact Productions
Production Countries:
Canada
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 66
The Phantom of the Operator is a poetic film collage that documents the construction and rise of female telephone operators and their eventual replacement with computerized communications systems.
a gorgeous Quebecois fever-dream built from some 80 years' worth of film shot by Bell labs for educational and promotional purposes. At it's loosely-called center is a picture of the women whose labor built the telecom behemoths that swarmed the earth in the last century. These early agents of globalization are now an endangered species, so there is a feeling throughout that one is looking on lost worlds of gender, labor and advertising. The method of editing found footage is often reduced to a sort of formalism that many might call "Burns-y", but this is....fantasmogoric. Towards the end, the crowd of women establishing the desired connections between parties has thinned to sparse minders of computer-equipped cubicles and we are asked, "How could we ever imagine that in designing the world as a network, we could inhabit that network as a world?" Women were brought in to the fledgling industry to highlight its powers of connectivity, of community-building. With the women replaced by machines, the question of whether this technology connects or isolates becomes highlighted. If you are a fan of phone operators, obsolete technology, or surreal dreamscapes; if you are concerned with issues of women in the workplace, gender roles applied to women, or the role of technology in communication, this film should entertain, at least.
