Sunday, March 3, 2013

A Jean-Louis Trintignant phone card


Souvenir of a business trip to Biarritz in the mid 1990s - a 120 Franc plastic 'Telecarte.' At the time collecting these cards was very popular (possibly still?).  Collectors / dealers used to find the best ones abandoned in phone booths at railway stations and airports (favoured because these places often had older ones brought in by visitors who had bought them on previous trips.)

This one appears to be worth about 1 Euro now - with higher prices (up to 20 Euros) for examples still 'as new' in the plastic film and blue tear-strip in which they were issued. One Canadian site is selling 15 'Cartes téléphonique TÉLÉCARTE FRANCE usagées' for 100 Euros - these feature:

Catherine Deneuve
Romy Schneider
Simone Signoret
Roman Polanski
Jean Gabin
Jeanne Moreau
Johnny Depp
Claude Lelouch
Bernard Blier
Michel Piccoli
Christian Clavier
Michel Serrault
Gérard Lanvien
Jean-Louis Trintignant
Gérard Depardieu & Christian Clavier

The image on the card is from the 1994 movie Three Colors: Red (dir:Krzysztof Kieślowski) in which JLT plays a troubled judge who eavesdrops on his neighbours' private telephone conversations.  Were all the other cards related to phone scenes in movies?

[The hobby is called telegery and hobbyists (apparently?) refer to themselves as fusilatelists. The rarest phone cards are those produced in limited quantities to test the market but then discontinued before catching on. They started in Italy in 1975 and are now regularly traded on Ebay.]

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