The Phantom of the Operator

2004
7.6| 1h6m| en| More Info
Released: 12 September 2004 Released
Producted By: Artifact Productions
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Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
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Synopsis

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.

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Reviews

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.
Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful
Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
Abegail Noëlle While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.
John/Rebecca 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.