The Phantom of the Operator

2004
7.6| 1h6m| en
Details

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.

Director

Producted By

Artifact Productions

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Reviews

BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment
SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie
Forumrxes Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.
Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.
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.