Phones and bones

MadCat films unearth forgotten history.

By Cheryl Eddy

NOWADAYS ANY FOOL can stroll out of Best Buy clutching a picture-snapping cell phone that trills "Nuthin' but a G Thang." But it wasn't so long ago that touch-tone dialing was the wave of the future – and female operators, once so crucial in connecting every call, were phased out by technology. Extensive found footage makes up Caroline Martel's The Phantom of the Operator – at 66 minutes, one of the longer entries in this year's MadCat Women's International Film Festival – a wistful search for "the ghosts of invisible women workers, without whom the 20th century would never be the same."

French Canadian filmmaker Martel excavates the "voice with a smile" using hundreds of corporate, industrial, and training films. Louise Brooks clones scamper around a switchboard, a circa-World War II tutorial offers smirking advice on "supervising women workers," and 1950s "telephone gals" make the most of their post-high school, pre-marriage years. As operators are shown working on their pronunciation and modeling new headsets, the film's spectral narrator observes her profession's unstoppable march toward obsolescence. "I was the first agent of globalization," she points out, as Martel's montage reveals inventions like the "data phone," a device where "machine talks to machine!" Not far behind: newfangled computers ("created by man") that further limit human involvement in the communications industry. Eventually, the narrator muses, "My presence was simulated by synthesizing my voice" – not necessarily "progress" to anyone who's ever screamed in frustration at an unhelpful robo-operator.

Martel's thorough approach to detective work is shared by local filmmaker Trina Lopez, whose A Second Final Rest: The History of San Francisco's Lost Cemeteries mixes new footage with vintage film, photographs, newspaper clippings, and city maps. Lopez also tracks down elderly San Francisco residents who remember both the original cemeteries and the large-scale removals that took place in the 1940s.

The controversies that marked these relocations – especially the fates of the bodies of poor people, which were extracted (except when, in shades of Poltergeist, they weren't) from individual plots and dumped into mass burial mounds – are still eyebrow-raisers, as are the then-and-now pics that show playgrounds, shopping centers, and homes atop the former sites of Laurel Hill, Masonic, and other graveyards. Lopez also visits the "only operating cemetery in the city," the Columbarium mausoleum, and scouts out remnants of recycled headstones at locations as disparate as the retaining wall at Ocean Beach and the Haight's Buena Vista Park.

Fans of MadCat's artfully compiled shorts programs will find plenty of standouts (Operator plays solo, but A Second Final Rest is matched with other peeks at the Bay Area underground in "City Nights.") "Women Speak Up" features documentaries from the golden age of feminism, including Liane Brandon's 1972 short, Betty Tells Her Story, a heartbreaking 20-minute tale of a lost dress that slowly becomes a metaphor for the teller's feelings of self-worth. Another night, "Unpacking Histories," is distinguished by Leslie Thornton's Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 10, 9, 8, 7, about the effects of atomic weapons – featuring, incredibly, the audio testimony of a woman who witnessed Hiroshima and is asked by US officials, "Did you see any other white people after the bombing? Were they injured?" as well as home movies of Thornton's own father, an Air Force pilot who was also present when the bomb was dropped.

MadCat Women's International Film Festival runs Sept. 13-Oct 6 at El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; Artists' Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; and the PFA Theater, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. For this week's schedule, see Film listings. For tickets ($7-$20) and a complete schedule, call (415) 436-9523 or go to www.madcatfilmfestival.org.