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Film Histories: Caroline Martel on Industry/Cinema

Caroline Martel’s video installation Industry/Cinema places ephemeral films alongside more familiar ones.

Film Histories: Caroline Martel on Industry/Cinema
Photo: Aaron Cutler

As you walk up the stairway at the Museum of the Moving Image, you’re greeted with a screen. On the left side is a black-and-white, silent, documentary image of young women dancing outdoors; on the right side is a tinted, silent, documentary image of a woman alone, twirling her dress. Perhaps curious, you approach, sit on a bench, and put on a pair of available headphones. The film on the right, Thomas A. Edison’s Annabelle Serpentine Dance, from 1894, you might recognize by face, if not by name. But playing on the left is a lesser-known work that holds equal entertainment and documentary value: the Bell Telephone Company of Canada’s 1920 film How Business Girls Keep Well.

Film canons and best-of lists are consistently built on a fiction, which is that the people building them have actually seen every movie ever made and can select the best accordingly. But a quick look at a list like the British magazine Sight & Sound’s recently released poll among more than 800 critics for the top 50 films of all time, which consists almost entirely of feature-length fiction works from the United States, Japan, Russia, and a few Western European countries, suggests this isn’t the case. The States alone have produced more than 500,000 “ephemeral films” (a term coined by American archivist Rick Prelinger, who also gave the statistic), short works created to advertise, promote, educate, and even entertain, and made both by corporations and by private individuals.

Caroline Martel’s video installation Industry/Cinema, which opened at the museum in May and whose run was recently extended until October 28, places ephemeral films alongside more familiar ones. Visitors can follow up to seven short juxtapositions of film images, and select which side to listen to by pressing a button on a pair of headphones. Charlie Chaplin works an assembly line while Chicago factory workers labor; HAL 2000 speaks in dialogue with phone-company promo films like those Stanley Kubrick and collaborators studied in order to construct the computer; an announcer tells listeners that telecommunications is transporting them into the future, while a young Jeff Bridges transforms digitally within the electronic world of 1982’s TRON. The overlapping sounds and images show and tell how much the two sets of movies have fed off of each other.

The bulk of the installation’s left-side films have come from telecommunications companies, which the Montréal-born Martel studied while making 2004’s The Phantom of the Operator, her found-footage film about the history of the industry as told through its vanishing female operators. Many operators, like those glimpsed in the installation’s opening, only exist now in the molds their companies made for them. I spoke to Martel on Skype in April as part of research for a previously published Moving Image Source piece. We discussed these women’s stories, as well as how they have led to her stories and her efforts to give space for her audiences to form their own.

How did you get the idea for the installation Industry/Cinema?

It was inspired by the feedback and questions I got from audiences following the many screenings of The Phantom of the Operator around the world. I like this claim that the idea for a work would come from the people. I’m attached to this notion probably all the more because, as an independent documentary filmmaker who has to flirt with the industry, I often hear this discourse that we have to “give the audiences what they want.” The film I just finished, about the early electronic musical instrument the Ondes Martenot, is about a subject that is nearly impossible to fund from broadcasters’ standpoint. But the incentive to make it also came from Q&As, by popular demand, when spectators were begging to understand this music that was part of the Phantom soundtrack.

So to go back to Industry/Cinema, it was audience questions that made me feel like there was something to explore. Many were expressing the feeling that they had already seen some images included in Phantom…They wondered, had I put in excerpts from 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Fahrenheit 451? I felt like there was a popular sense of recognition that I should take the chance to verify. I felt like, “What if I look back at my huge collection of 200 telecommunications films and see how it cross-references the films we know?” Whether fiction or important documentaries like Berlin, Symphony of a City.

I have to confess I had never seen Modern Times until three years ago, but when I saw it, I thought, “Wow, Chaplin really copied the wheels in the Western Electric films!” I also saw the restored print of 2001 with my editor while we were finishing Phantom of the Operator, and we were like, “My God, he took so much from all the Bell Labs films!” It was obvious that it was not only industrial films that had copied all those famous films, like advertisements are doing now, but it was also the other way around.

In this installation I focus on industrial films, but as we know, there are educational films, recruitment films, and all these other kinds of ephemeral and/or orphan film genres. They’ve been in the shadow of film history, so the intention of the installation was to bring them out. Are you familiar with Rick Prelinger’s foundational ideas on ephemeral films, and the fact that these films are “in the darker side of the American dreams?”—as he writes on the Our Secret Century CD-ROM series cover? A background idea to Industry/Cinema is that these films are in the shadow of film and media history, in our collective unconscious, ready to be revealed.

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Some filmic styles and even specific shots were constantly being repeated in the industrial and traditionally canonized moving images I examined: close-up shots of wheels turning, of horizontal curtains opening, of passersby seen through windows, of traveling shots in computer-generated images of networks. So it made me feel like these images could be seen as iconic. In that sense, you could say Industry/Cinema takes a semiotic approach, bringing out these recurring visual themes, that almost became clichés. But it was also important for me not to force the resonances between the two image regimes. There’s a documentary approach that I care about, which is simply to reveal what was already in the films.

Sponsored filmmaking is a practice that’s important to understand in order to understand moviemaking in a larger picture. For instance, it allowed filmmakers to finance their more personal films while learning their trade. From this perspective, this practice has contributed to the economies of 20th-century filmmaking in a particular way. But it’s also a fascinating body of work unto itself and has a lot of documentary value. It’s really entertaining, and often extremely beautiful.

Do you remember the first time you saw an industrial film?

In terms of ephemeral films in general, it goes back to high school, when our chemistry teacher would suddenly decide we could afford a break from the curriculum. He would pull out his 16mm projector and show us some 1970s-to-1980s Hydro-Québec films about how the North got developed with some major hydroelectric projects. Somehow we never questioned why he would do so. We just enjoyed.

If you talk of industrial films truly made for industry, it was when I started looking for moving images of telephone operators at the Bell Canada historical center in Montréal. When I think of it, it’s likely that the first one I saw was Nell Cox’s Operator!, a sexy recruitment film she shot with Ricky Leacock for AT&T.

How did you start working with industrial films?

I started The Phantom of the Operator project in the final year of my B.A. in Communication Studies at Concordia University, when I wanted to make a film on the history of telephone operators. I did a lot of background research, including interviews with retired operators and current union leaders at Bell Canada. But it was impossible to find moving images of real operators. So Phantom gradually became a film about how the real workers have been invisible, and how their images have instead been constructed through films that were produced by the companies. As I like to say, the final film is maybe the 10th “operation system” of the initial idea I had.

To the extent of your knowledge, are the people appearing in the industrial films as themselves, or are they professional actors playing these roles?

It depends on each film. In the 1910s, for instance, real operators were depicted more or less naturally. I don’t remember having seen any documentary images of solo local switchboard operators, but more ranks of operators from the city, looking like an impressive assembly line of workers in Victorian dresses. I think that the representation of operators using professional actresses really came with talking cinema. I’d say that the companies used models and actresses from the 1940s to the beginning of the 1960s.

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But there are exceptions. There’s a film that is excerpted in The Phantom of the Operator with an operator who gleefully says “Your voice is…you!”—that plays on the Hollywood musical comedy tradition, with each operator incarnating a different quality of “The Voice with a Smile.” In this case, I bet that these are real operators who, on their time off, wrote this skit, made the pasteboard décor, and then performed it for the training film. That’s one instance of the operators representing “themselves,” but totally one with this ideal of the Voice with a Smile.

“The Voice with a Smile” was what the operators were called from roughly the late 1910s until the 1960s. This was coined under the presidency of Theodore Vail, the head of AT&T in the States from 1885 to 1887 and then from 1907 to 1919, who was quite wise PR-wise. “The Voice with a Smile” is a hell of a wonderful (and slimy) PR nickname that was aimed at “inspiring” and disciplining the operators to be pleasant and to “look” good in the caller’s mind and imagination. Prior to this, in the 1890s, operators were called “Central,” then the “Business Girls” or the “Hello Girls.”

Operator! is, to me, the last film that was made showing the operators as those sexy happy young girls. And then, in the 1970s, when the documentary ethics momentarily took over corporate filmmaking, it became much more of a realistic people-oriented representation. This also came in conjunction with affirmative-action measures in the United States, which made major American companies comply with racial and sexual diversity in all types of positions. For instance, the other film Nell Cox made was All Kinds of People. There you see real operators who aren’t that young, and some of color, and some males. But, gradually, really, what became sexy was the inside of some new technology… That’s what I could notice by watching at all these films from the mid-1970s on.

This seems to me to be something you address in both Phantom and in Industry/Cinema, which is that the image of the woman, and the qualities attributed to the female employee, gradually shift to being attributed to the machine itself.

Yes. At first the operators were there to facilitate the technology, to allow it to “pass,” be accepted, appreciated, and then adopted. Then gradually the situation got reversed. Technology became sexy, and the operators weren’t that appealing anymore, especially behind their computers.

How did the telecommunications industry evolve in the United States and in Canada?

For the better part of the 20th century, the Bell System, the North American telecommunications company, was the largest corporation in the world. With a tripartite structure encompassing the entire telecommunications production line, it also maintained a privileged relationship with the government and the military industry. A monopoly in most of the United States and Canada, it retained its strategic position up until the dismantling of “Ma Bell,” instigated by antitrust legislation in the late 1970s. While in many European countries the telephone was nationalized, in North America it was actually very much a private enterprise with a public service aura, offering a “universal” service. “One policy, one system, one universal service” was the dictum put forth under Theodore Vail’s reign—to justify all the more AT&T’s “natural monopoly.” I didn’t do research per se about the history of the telephone industry in Europe, but it was not the same bed for corporate intelligentsia to be developed as it was here.

The Bell system has always been a technologically trailblazing communications company—participating in the development of talking pictures, and later on of the microprocessor. But it also has been a pioneer in communications, breaking ground in modern public relations practices since around 1910. As part of its efforts, Bell continuously produced a large quantity of recruitment, information, training, education, industrial, and publicity films, often with high production values, made for both external and internal use.

One of the hypotheses of Phantom is to see how the telecommunications industry was at the forefront of a lot of managerial experimentations. Indeed, again under Theodore Vail, AT&T put forth a kind of corporate paternalism with their employees, by organizing “recreational” activities for them, or allowing them to become stockholders as part of their salary. Of course, this concurred with the rise of unionization of labor in North America—which the Bell System was effective at discouraging as part of its “familial” structure. Industrial psychology was also very much experimented within the manufacturing arm of the Bell System, notably with the pioneering Hawthorne experiments at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works factories in Cicero, Illinois, that begun in 1924. This study, although originally to evaluate the impact of light on workers’ performance, gave way to the discovery that being studied was indeed a factor that impacted positively workers’ productivity. This later gave way to what was called “the Hawthorne Effect.” Another instance of pioneering studies made for the Bell System was by Alvin Toffler in the ’60s, who was hired as a consultant. He recommended the dismantling of “Ma Bell” to the management a decade before the government imposed it. He also predicted how consumption would evolve within the telecommunications industry, for instance with subscribers being able to choose between telephones of different colors instead of the classic black ones. This inspired his 1985 book The Adaptive Corporation.

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The influence of the Bell System on 20th-century North American society and culture has thus been far and wide, from the managerial sphere to the popular, from business and technology to the general culture at large.

Are all the pieces that you present in Industry/Cinema privately funded, or were some made with public money?

They are industrials, funded by the industry! However, playing alongside a clip from Modern Times, the Frank B. Gilbreth films were funded by the Chicago chapter of the Society for the Advancement of Management. These are scientific management films indeed, demonstrating the “One Best Way” to reduce the number of motions required to perform a task. The goal of this research was to increase productivity, while also reducing work hours and fatigue.

On the left side of the installation you’re consistently having the industrial films, and on the right side you’re consistently having the more canonical films. Do you anticipate an audience favoring one side? Did you want this?

I would love them to embrace it as one image—as split-screen, rather than dual-screen. Of course, your eyes always want to go from one side to the other, but that’s why a proper distance from the screen is crucial. Then there are also the distinctive soundtracks that can allow you to be tuned to one side while looking at the other.

But since it’s a gallery-based project, I would also like Industry/Cinema to stand visually unto itself, as something on the wall that is aesthetically intriguing and pleasing, and don’t have to rely on sound to “make sense.”

You use a voiceover in Phantom, but there’s no voiceover in Industry/Cinema. It’s the images with their own original soundtracks.

…or with the other film’s soundtrack. When we were editing the excerpts, we didn’t intentionally try to edit so the right soundtrack would for instance apply wittily to the left channel. But people have reported that they have experienced interesting synchronizations. Some even took care to see the installation twice because they loved to apply the soundtrack from one screen over the other. So although there’s no voiceover resonating with the images, there’s this potential comment on the images by a superimposed soundtrack.

I see something running throughout both works, which is a fascination not just with industry, but in particular with the communications industry, of which filmmaking is an arm. What do you find compelling about it? First off, do you accept the term “communications industry”?

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Well, the distinction between the uses of terms has interesting historical connotations. The communications industry, which lasted roughly from the beginning of the 20th century to around the 1950s, had a humanistic aura attached to it. From about 1910, the figure of Alexander Graham Bell had been used by the company to give itself some “soul,” tying its faith to the very inspired invention of the technology. Borrowing from the humanistic, innovative, and benevolent spirit of the inventor, this also helped to naturalize the ideal of service for its employees—called the “communications people”—and to ground its ideology of progress in some mythical initial stages. Business was supported supposed to be about the ideal of allowing people to be in touch with one another, to the point where peace could happen because nations could be in touch through the telephone… Tthat was part of the propaganda, but people also believed it. The operators felt that they were part of this very positive intervention, and they were right! I could see, in Bell’s corporate literature, that the good inventor’s icon remained until the 1980s, but then it became residual, no longer a must, de rigueur, to celebrate the phone. When it became more about telecommunications, it was more about progress for technology’s sake through the networks. Then in the early 1990s the term “telecoms” rose, when the phone companies wanted to stay “current.” And now we’re deeply into another realm with the Internet.

But for instance, we have over email and Skype a lot of conversations now that we would have had 30 years ago over the telephone. And this is a branch of the communications industry as well.

Yes, and after all it’s always been about networks and humans.

As long as there has been an advertising industry, it seems, technology has been advertised as a way to connect people. Do you feel that this installation also addresses the shift from telecommunications to something even more electronic?

You mean like leading to TRON? Yes, in TRON he’s literally in the networks, and we know that this has become the case for us. Now it’s as if the world we live in, in our Western world and in urban areas, is a network. We’re always ready to have this pulse of data coming to us, and people trying to be in touch with us. We’re always prepared to get this input, we are under both a social and an electrical tension.

This is your first installation. How have you found installation work different from film work?

I really have loved to do space-based “film,” and I would love to do more in the future.

As someone who’s mostly worked in film, what first appealed to me was the idea that I didn’t have to be tied to one straight screening on the wall, so that’s what I first explored when I was invited in 2009 to do a residency at Montreal’s Dazibao gallery. I contemplated having two rotating projectors so that the images would cross one another on the four walls of the gallery—with synchronizing moments of mutual recognition between industrial and canonical images embedded in “programmed” editing. This was technically exciting and challenging to figure out, but in the end, there was a risk that the dispositive would take over the content. So we came down to a dual projection on a wall. However, the first time Industry/Cinema was shown, the gallery could not angle the projectors so that the videos would actually touch; this had conceptual implications, because I was aiming the installation to project “one” frame, with the two image “regimes” playing directly next and with each other, not separately. But instead, reinforced by the fact that there were two pairs of headsets, they felt like they were two screenings in parallel. So this first presentation of Industry/Cinema was a bit like a blueprint. The version we have at the Museum of the Moving Image is now really the one, especially with 20 state-of-the-art headphones with their individual switches for the soundtracks!

But to go back to your question about the difference between film and installation works, I’ve enjoyed experimenting with the differences between the types of engagement of spectators/visitors in both media. As a media artist, I consider that the final part of my creative job is to pay attention to how people respond to and navigate with a piece I made. I have to become a kind of voyeur of their reception, tune into them. I always keep openness in the process, a place for doubt, even when the piece is “finished.”

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So an installation gives you a privileged opportunity to see people actively interacting. For instance with Industry/Cinema it was fun to watch how people would play with the sound channels, “get” it and stick around for another round, not “get” it and leave after two minutes, etcetera. I think that spectators are always active, but unfortunately they are nowadays getting used to seeing works that are the products of our ADD culture. I prefer to keep space in my work for the spectators, to leave them the room to “make sense,” make the connections themselves from their own knowledge, experiences, moods. I have these comments from people who say, “Thank you for taking for granted your audience is intelligent!” And then there are others who don’t connect the dots, and feel the piece is simply “too long.” All is fine for me, it just fascinates me tremendously!

What industrial films would you recommend for beginners? And how can they find them?

In the United States, a great way to start is to consult the guide book that the National Film Preservation Foundation, with Rick Prelinger, came up with: The Field Guide to Sponsored Films, from 2006. Some people expressed reservations that this type of initiative might create “canons,” but it’s a great way to start, and the films are mainly available online through archive.org. In Canada, there’s a database that was developed by a research group led by professor Charles Acland at Concordia University, the Canadian Educational, Sponsored, and Industrial Film Project. The films can even be viewed on the in-progress website. For Europe, there’s a recent publication that is worth checking out for key European industrials references, edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau: Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Production of Media.

What can you tell us about your new film?

Wavemakers is an independent feature-length documentary about the legacy of one of the first electronic musical instruments—and actually the most sensitive and expressive one—the Ondes Martenot. Mixing direct cinema, musical moments, and never-seen-before archival material, this film journey uncovers the Martenot as a missing link in the cultural history of the 20th century.

Hearing unusual interferences coming from radio vacuum tubes one night during World War I, the French musician and educator Maurice Martenot dreamed of an instrument that would turn the new material of the times, electricity, into music, but electronic music with a distinctive human touch. Despite being celebrated as the musical invention of the 20th century, his instrument is rarely seen—but yet has been heard by most. From early French films noir to sci-fi TV programs like The Thunderbirds, Hollywood classics such as Lawrence of Arabia, to the romance of Amélie or the epic There Will be Blood, the sound of the ondes Martenot has infiltrated the soundtrack of our time. Its unique character has been championed by popular musicians like Jonny Greenwood, who is in the film, and Édith Piaf, and by major contemporary classic composers such as Olivier Messiaen. However, only about 70 functioning Martenots are still around today…
A little bit of an experimental documentary, while having strong historical grounding, and mostly indulging in vérité moments, Wavemakers features musicians, scientists, luthiers, and raconteurs of the Martenot legends who attempt to uncover the magic behind this sensual and sophisticated instrument.

You’ve said that the Canadian Peter Mettler, whose new film The End of Time will soon screen at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), is your favorite filmmaker. What do you value about his work?

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He uses cinema as a tool of fundamental exploration, and says something like film is about dreaming not just in the world, but with it. Indeed, his films are part of a profound quest that many call metaphysical, saying like he’s trying to film the unfilmable. He’s the most splendid director of photography. In fact, his direction, his vision is in good part embedded in his camera work. But he pays an equally great attention to the creation of his soundtrack. I also admire him as an independent filmmaker who cares about every step of the conceptual process.

Thanks to Jason Eppink, Dennis Lim, Sam Love, Marion Miclet, David Schwartz, Thanassi Karageorgiou, and all the other workers at the Museum of the Moving Image.

This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

Aaron Cutler

Aaron Cutler lives in São Paulo and runs the film criticism site The Moviegoer.

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