Although she owns three cell phones now, don’t expect to see Caroline Martel texting or surfing the web from her mobile device.
“[Cell phones] make me feel ungrounded,” she said. “I’m a bit old fashioned in that sense. I like a phone when it’s linked to a space and the cell phone is a bit unsettling to me because you can be anywhere with the phone. You talk to someone but you don’t really know where that person is.”
The documentary filmmaker, who’s 2004 film “Phantom of the Operator” will screen at UNB on Feb. 23, owns what she calls a “very primitive” cell phone, that might have been hip a few years ago.
But if it seems strange that someone as interested in communication technology as Martel isn’t interested in owning the hottest new device on the market, it shouldn’t. Unlike many who study technology, Martel doesn’t want to study the technology—she is interested in the social history.
And the best way she found to study that was to look at the role of the operator.
“They’ve always been for me kind of at the forefront of all kinds of trends in working modes,” she said. “Stress in the workplace, all kinds of trends in terms of work,women, lifestyles. The operators in the 90s were not only the most stressed women workers in Quebec, they had double the amount of stress of the average Quebecois women working.”
Martel said the role of the operator caused a lot of change in the work force. “Broken hours” were typical, and over time, cases of carpal tunnel became common as well.
But through all this, among operators there was a “spirit of service”–something Martel said disappeared with the introduction of the call centre.
“Call centre agents, if they could be replaced by machines, they would be replaced by machines,” she said. “Now, the call centre agent is in Morroco … so what does she know about my neighbourhood?”
“It’s a big paradigm shift. In a way, my film is about that pre-history of what we have now.”
For Martel, documentary proved the best way to go about her exploration.
“You deal with things as they happen. You deal with human beings…you can never ride the wave of what people call reality. You get inspired by how things are, but at the same time, you sort of impact them by making the film. It’s sort of an intricate relationship.”
Anthony Kinik, the multimedia studies professor who invited Martel to UNB, agreed. He invited Martel to speak with his class as part of a segment dedicated to compilation documentaries.
“I was going to show her film to my class anyway, because it’s an excellent example of the genre and how you can create a brilliant documentary without even picking up a camera,” he said. “But then I had the idea of trying to bring her in so that she could talk to the class about documentary filmmaking and being a documentary filmmaker.”
“The Phantom of the Operator” will be shown Feb. 23 at MacLaggan Hall, 8:30 PM. There’s no charge and all are welcome to attend.
