Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

I haven’t catalogued it with any meticulousness, but one of the most frequently uttered words in all of classical cinema is surely operator. If we subtract the sea of everyday parlance from our calculations, we might begin to see how much this one word—spoken into the transmitter, with a receiver pressed to the ear—begins to bubble to the surface. Operator, operator. Characters in pre-1960 movies can scarcely make it halfway through a film’s runtime without invoking this unseen figure’s intervention in some personal matter crucial to the orderly running of its plot.

Cinema was connected with the telephone from the beginning. Telephones came into popular usage just as the artform itself left its infancy, surging in use in western households through the first decades of the 20th century. Just like going to the movies, telephone use made the world smaller, bridging physical distances and absorbing users (or viewers) in stories far beyond the borders of their immediate locales. Filmmakers, in parallel, quickly devised a myriad of ways to depict their use and integrate it in drama, inventing new forms in the process. Yet rarely do we see the actual switchboard operator so often invoked directly—that is, beyond fleeting appearances in montages of frantic, city-wide searches for connection. Switchboard operators are an invisible presence in classical cinema, a hidden labour force plugging the various wires of plot into place without making their appearances, thoughts, or feelings known.

By the late 1970s, as classical cinema had given way to a new model transformed by new waves and new auteurs, most home phones had switched to automatic connections and rotary dialling, displacing the women-dominated industry of switchboard operators who had once played such a crucial social—and cinematic—role. In Yugoslavia in 1967—the year the Serbian Dušan Makavejev released his second feature film, Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Ljubavni slučaj ili tragedija službenice P.T.T.)—such operators remained, perhaps paradoxically, a trendy symbol of modernity, their looming obsolescence deferred by the socialist country’s slow adoption of western technology.

Known best for his political-essayistic style of making films, and his association with certain controversial far-left cults and communes, Makavejev has always been a sweeter and more tenderly human artist than a dry summary of his works might imply. Polyphonic political films like W.R. Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Sweet Movie (1974), which provoked endless polemics and swift state bans for their studies and celebrations of liberated sexual politics, are as much about human detail as about any sweeping ideological notion. Love Affair is about the senseless murder of a young, beautiful switchboard operator by her domestic partner, told backwards, but without any real mystery: he’s a drunk, he’s jealous, he kills her in a stupid rage. Despite the bleakness of the bookended scenes—alternately showing us an analysis of the crime scene and her sodden corpse and the full spectacle of her pointless death—we otherwise are left to bask in the sensitivity of Makavejev’s almost child-like observations, even as he’s using the plot to draw flippant connections between the various absurdities of modern urban life and, in cutaways to newsreels, state-imposed ideological education. “Is there going to be a reform of a man? Is the new man going to keep some of his old organs?” reads the perplexing title card, before we’re introduced to Dr. Alexander Kotić, an elderly sexologist who opines that “sexuality is of great interest to me—scientifically, of course.” As Kotić shows us a range of sexually explicit drawings and etchings from history, it’s obvious this is Makavejev’s typically cheeky method of tethering the particulars of his film's “love affair” to a broader historical continuity of artistic representation and reflection upon gendered relations.

Yugoslavia has its contradictions, but is for Makavejev a site of experimentation and liberation, however chaotic and circumscribed. By making his lead an ethnic Hungarian who struggles with the customs of Serbian-majority Belgrade, and her partner, Ahmed, a Montenegrin Muslim, he documents the diversity of the socialist country at arguably the height of its powers and aspirations, even while it was also plagued by anti-clerical protests, rat infestations, and unceasing construction work transforming the city’s face brick by brick. All of which we see! Often, the montage itself forces these connections, moving from idyllic lovemaking in an apartment to people raiding churches and desecrating spires or hunting swarms of rats in the open-air construction sites throughout the city. In Makavejev, no idea is too blunt to be bundled together, and everything has a continuity.

Switchboard operating was an industry where single women could be gainfully employed—a repetitive, mechanical form of labour that, despite its tediousness, seemed to embody the exciting interconnectedness of modern urban life. The role of this profession, in Love Affair and elsewhere, is to facilitate connection between disparate sounds and people on the other ends of a line. That is, a little like Makavejev himself, connecting thematic cables to light up the circuitous switchboard of his cinema.