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Terri Francis,
"What Does Beyoncé See in Josephine Baker?: A Brief Film History of Sampling La Diva, La Bakaire"
(page 3 of 5)
Within the body of motion pictures that reference Baker, which
includes her No. 8 ranking on "Wayne's Top Ten Babes of All Time,"[10]
she tends not to be the central character. There is a passing reference
to her by a character in Coffee and Cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch
2004) when he discusses a past era in Paris' café culture,
perhaps when a certain Parisian flair for flirtation, fashion, and
fantasy-in-the-everyday seemed within easier reach. In Triplets of
Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, 2003), an animated version of Baker in
the banana skirt capitalizes on her as it explores the erotic and
exoticist dimensions of her relationship with her audiences. In
Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002) she appears as "Paris Chanteuse"
(Karine Plantadit-Bageot) and as a figure of Frida Kahlo's sexual
imagination. Beneath the radar of these theatrically released films is a
short piece, Tree Shade (Lisa Collins, 1998), which circulated at
festivals and is now distributed by Women Make Movies. In evoking
Baker's performance through an experimental form, it offers sharp
insight on the relationship among citation, cinema, and Baker's
performance.
Tree Shade is a fable about a student, Savannah Mayfield
(Renée Griggsby), coming to terms with her family tree through a
class assignment to research her genealogy. The film is divided into
segments that represent matriarchal generations of one family, and each
woman's story is rendered in the film style common to that time, with
some contemporary touches that are witty and somewhat macabre. In the
first section, which appears to be the pre-sound era of the 1920s, a
maid named Etta Mae Mayfield (Girlina, a female impersonator) looks
uncannily similar to Baker. She has the characteristic flapper hairstyle
with the curl that Baker helped make into a style phenomenon. A
self-expressive character, she reaches beyond her servant role and, like
Baker, is drawn to beautiful clothes and the sensual pleasures of
dancing. In the rising action of the scene, Etta Mae is interrupted by
her husband the gardener (uncredited), who has stolen a visit with her
while the bosses are supposedly away for the day. After initially
scolding him, she relents and even changes into one of her mistress'
dresses, whose stylish cut contrasts with her uniform. We see the
newlywed couple emerge from their working roles through their dancing,
but only for a moment because the owners return unexpectedly, returning
the couple to their places. What ensues in this confrontation lands Etta
Mae in jail, but not before she flashes a direct look into the camera.
Etta Mae's crime is to defend herself and protect her husband, but
she is arrested—not strictly to punish her action, but to mark the
boundaries inside which black women's personalities should remain. The
maid's crime is audacity. The film encourages a sympathetic reception of
Etta Mae's crimes by emphasizing the way they reflect her will to
pleasure, love, and style. The way the film takes Etta Mae's perspective
and depicts her abandonment of her assigned roles sweetly heroic makes
Tree Shade one of the more startling Baker evocations in the
cohort of samples.
Together with the films in which Baker actually starred, they
constitute Baker's cinematographic history, albeit in various ways.
Baker samples range from work that cites her in a concrete way, such as
film and vocal recording excerpts, to those that evoke her through
partial references or imitations, such as in Beyoncé's recent
work and in Tree Shade, and in those films in which she appears
as herself. Three final examples illustrate this continuum: Touki
Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1972), Alma's Rainbow
(Ayoka Chenzira, 1994), and Madame Sata (Karim Ainouz, 2002).
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