The Poetry of Artifacts
To coincide with the exceptional circumstances of hosting the annual congress of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), we are offering a program highlighting the strengths of our collections and our mandate: animated film gems, world premiere commissioned works, newly restored features, documentaries devoted to heritage questions and the reuse of archives.
The Phantom of the Operator marked a milestone in the history of re-use films in Quebec. Acclaimed in numerous festivals, this bewitching documentary presents a forgotten profession, the telephone operator, using corporate and industrial archives meticulously located and edited by the filmmaker. Caroline Martel's gaze is undeniably driven by curiosity and affection. The film will be preceded by Frédéric Back's Canadian animated classic Crac! a film that, in its own way, echoes Caroline Martel's, as it recounts the “re-use” of a lullaby over the decades in Quebec.
In the presence of the filmmaker, Caroline Martel
The rocking chair sets the pace for the entire life of a Quebec family. When the city invades the countryside, the family becomes smaller and the chair no longer occupies center stage. Unless the janitor of the Museum of Modern Art has retained his taste for rocking...
Preserved in our collections
Like a shadow image, a voice guides us on a journey of science and fiction through hundreds of archival films tracing the history of telephone operators. The Phantom of the Operator reveals them in an absolutely unique film montage, created essentially from a hundreds of films produced between 1903 and 1989 for American telephone companies. A fantastic archaeological study of our era, the film offers a disturbing yet luminous portrait of human society in the technocratic era.
Frédéric Back
Born in 1924 in the Saarland, a German territory under France administration at the time, Frédéric Back grew up surrounded by a musician father and an artist mother. He studied drawing at a young age and later attended art school. He began his career as a painter before moving to Montreal in 1948, where he taught at l'École du meuble and the School of Fine Arts. In 1968, he joined Radio-Canada's animation studio. There, he created ten short films that would showcase his talent and earn him international acclaim. With Crac and The Man Who Planted Trees, he won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film twice. Throughout his life and in his films, he was always involved in ecological projects and made sure to raise awareness about environmental issues.
Caroline Martel
Caroline Martel is a Quebec documentary filmmaker. Her film The Phantom of the Operator (2004) has had an exceptional international career and has been hailed as "the kind of intelligent, rigorous work that will stand the test of time." The result of more than five years of research and (re)discovery around one of the first electronic musical instruments, the ondes Martenot, her feature documentary Le chant des ondes (2012) has won several international awards. Her first exhibition, the montage installation Industry/Cinema, was presented at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2012. She holds a BA in Communications and an MA in Media Studies and is currently a PhD candidate in Research/Creation at Concordia University.
Photo: Collections de la Cinémathèque québécoise
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Frédéric Back: The Legacy of a Pioneer at Radio-Canada
Let's pay tribute to the artist Frédéric Back. The work of this exceptional illustrator and filmmaker is intimately linked to the history of Radio-Canada. [Their] archives allow us to trace his career under three main aspects: the television pioneer, the master of animation, and the committed artist.
