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
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