Nowadays, when phone calls are diverted to an automated answering system, the woman's voice on the other end speaks in the detached manner and awkward cadence of computer-generated speech. It's a far cry from the flesh-and-blood, motherly-voiced women who, in an era not too long ago, welcomed our calls in what the telephone companies called the "voice with a smile."
To make a kind of video memorial to this army of women who provided those voices with smiles, Canadian documentary maker Caroline Martel dug up hours of footage from about 200 telephone-company corporate training videos to make her film The Phantom of the Operator, which screens today at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TIDF
"I wanted to show women's contribution to the workforce and their role at the base of the century of communication," Martel said in an interview in Taipei, where she is visiting while her film participates in the festival's competition section.
That role played by the operators, however, has been drastically undercut by the advent of automated systems. Their entire sub-culture is gradually vanishing, Martel said.
This fact prompted her to construct the film using archive footage and a narration that sounds as though it were broadcast from outer space, whispering a contemporary legend about the lives of these iconic 20th-century women to a soundtrack made using an odd, mid-20th century electronic music instrument called the "ondes Martenot."
The result looks and sounds like a dream, with loosely connected flashes that gradually reveal details about operators and the culture in which they worked.
Telephone companies initially employed men to be operators, Martel said, but, fearing that they would unionize, began hiring women to perform the job, correctly calculating that women's high turnover rate would stave of the formation of unions. The task for the companies, then, was to find a way to feminize and glamorize, what was, in fact, a highly stressful, underpaid and difficult job.
The company films that attempt to instill this propaganda are at times hilarious, with third-rate actresses speaking wide-eyed and unconvincingly of the satisfaction that being an operator brings to their lives. The jobs, as they describe them, offer stability, community and an opportunity for them to carry out their nurturing instincts by helping connect people and facilitate inter-personal communication.
In scores of interviews with former operators over a period of nine years, Martel said the women believed wholeheartedly that they fulfilled a unique, indeed, practically motherly role to customers, despite the glaring hardships of the job. She called the operators' attachment to their jobs a "perverse love affair."
The dark side of the job is brought out in many of the clips from the 1930s and 1940s that show the strict regimentation of the job. Operators are marched military-style to their posts at the switchboards, where behind them, matron-like floor managers pace back and forth monitoring speed and accuracy. Clearly, the companies felt no need in that era to mask their goal of achieving maximum employee efficiency. Later, when the frisson of feeling needed by the company had worn off, the companies adopted a new tack, focusing on "the voice with a smile" and sexing up the job.
According to Martel, telephone companies were before their time in hiring industrial psychologists to work out exactly how to lure women into the job. Companies cast the job of an operator as a wonderful thing by suggesting it bestowed a heightened femininity. Not only could being an operator help them act out their feminine roles, but it can improve them as women.
With this type a self-affirming identity as an operator it's no wonder, Martel says, the women objected strongly to being downsized at the end of the 1990s. Never mind that they were guinea pigs in an industry that would foreshadow many of the century's industrial practices and abuses, such as mass production, management surveillance and job-related physical ailments like carpal-tunnel syndrome.
So, while the operators worked seemingly behind the scenes, they were in fact at the forefront of the last century's technological revolution and all of its attendant social, cultural, economic and even physical phenomena. Phantom of the Operator does a commendable job in making this clear and at preserving a record of a mostly unseen culture that is fading rapidly into memory.
Film festival notes:
What: The 4th Taiwan InternationalDocumentary Festival.
When: Until Friday.
Where: Showtime Cinema (欣欣晶華影城), 247 Linsen N Rd, Taipei (台北市林森北路247號).
Spot-Taipei Film House (光點台北), 18 Zhongshan N Rd, Sec 2, Taipei
接線生魅影
卡洛琳瑪黛
加拿大多倫多國際影展
溫哥華國際影展
本片取材自1910至1989年間,北美洲的電話公司所攝製的影片,從中剪輯而成。它帶領我們回顧電話接線生的沿革,她們猶如無限擴張的宇宙裡的流星。超過百部工業、廣告與教育影片的資料,是本片的原始靈感來源。這些影片儘管被電影史所忽略,它們卻讓人們看清楚過去一個世紀裡,企業界、科學界與普羅大眾的想像世界。片中描寫無數如幽靈般的婦女,在通訊系統中服務,而今這個系統已經把她們給吞噬光了。或許這些影片裡,也紀錄了她們消逝的蛛絲馬跡。
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not