Foil, Fiction, and Phantasm:
'Josephine Baker' in Princess Tam Tam
Josephine's first manner—jumping from one race to the
other, from one continent to the other—brought us in touch with an
unconscious that "displaces lines," jostles our ways of seeing, calls us
back to the primitive order.
—Pierre Mac Orlan, in Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker, 20[1]
I learned at the cinema what a nigger was.
—A nigger over here, Marc Allégret shouted, a nigger over there. Bring me a
nigger ... Hand over the nigger...
I was waiting for the nigger. I am
given an explanation.... It was a blackboard on which were written the
actors' dialogues.
(Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker,
157)
What can Princess Tam Tam, a film about how to overcome
writer's block that features Josephine Baker in the role of foil, tell
us about creation in relation to "racial" and sexual difference? In
1935, exactly a decade after her scandalous appearance in La Revue
Nègre, Baker was at the height of her success. She had appeared in a
successful film Zou Zou in 1934 and been offered the lead role of
Dora in Offenbach's La Créole that same year. As numerous
critics have observed, a Pygmalion plot line informs Princess Tam
Tam, but it is the narrative "reality" of the muse as a "source of
inspiration"—the name of Baker's character's name is Alwina, or "little
spring"—that lies at the core of the film's dénouement.[2] Had Max
de Mirecourt, the afflicted Parisian writer, not encountered Alwina, he
would not have written the novel that eventually helps him regain his
wife's affection. His secretary, Coton, admits at one point that "these
race stories can make a very fashionable novel," thus underscoring the
topicality of the racial theme in France of the 1930s.[3] This topicality
must in turn be applied to the film. The novel itself
(l'objet-livre), the book as material object, ultimately devoured
by Alwina's mindless donkey, appears as a mere pretext for the reunion
of the Parisian socialite couple. However, as a film segment, the
fictitious transformation of Alwina into an Indian princess, and her
subsequent triumph as an inspired natural performer of the conga,
parallels Baker's own career in reverse. She first performed la danse
sauvage with her Antillean partner Joe Alex as a tableau in La
Revue Nègre and became famous overnight. That performance propelled
her to stardom.
The three films that remain linked to Josephine
Baker's early career are all vehicles for her talent as a performer and
a singer. They all mimic—or rather introduce—fictional variations of her
real-life rise from the suburbs of East St. Louis to the glory of an
international career. In Siren of the Tropics (1927), she lives
in a Spanish-speaking West Indian island and pursues her lover to Paris,
where her dancing makes her famous. In Zou Zou (1934) she is a
laundress who ends up standing in for the capricious star of a show when
the latter runs away with a lover. In Princess Tam Tam, the final
dance reveals that the Princess of Parador is a sham, and it marks the
end of Max de Mirecourt's novel, which is aptly titled
Civilization. The veneer of civilization cracks to reveal
Alwina's "true" nature. To perform her act, she frantically flings her
shoes away, tears off her clothes, and enacts the primal scene of the
near-naked dancing black female. Princess Tam Tam is thus unique
in its conscious play on fiction (Baker as a naïve savage girl) as foil
for the real (Baker as an international star), on failure and success
(Max) as a foil for genuine artistic talent (Baker). In the film, the
complex relation between desire and creation within the context of
colonial phantasm in which Baker's success is inscribed, clearly maps
out the fantasy at the core of the viewer's fascination with the black
star.[4]
The fact that there was a real-life Baker who became a
star—what could be called the "resistance of the referent" or "the
stubbornness of the referent," to borrow Roland Barthes's
terminology—undermines the overtly racist, Orientalist reading of the
film's narrative.[5]
Moreover, Alwina's transformation coincides with what
Barthes would call a biographème, or "biographic traits within a
writer's oeuvre," a term that must be applied in the present case to
Baker the artist.[6]
As a young girl, Baker, Cinderella-like, dreamed of
princesses and fairy tales: "Queens were blond, they would go down
massive stairs. There were always steps and steps. Thus neither the
kings nor the queens would come up to meet me" (M, 390).[7]
Stairs would
feature prominently in her performances, many of which had at their core
the star walking down stairs, a number that Mistinguett initiated in the
French music hall.[8] Since kings and blond queens refused to come to her,
the African-American Baker changed herself into a movie princess, as in
Princess Tam Tam, and in life, as her worldwide success
attests.[9]
The film does not purport to be more than
entertainment and a tribute to Baker's talent. Pepito Abatino, Baker's
agent and companion at the time, feared that Baker's success might be
short-lived. Consequently, he pushed her beyond dancing, to sing and
then to star in silent and motion pictures. This initiative firmly
grounded Baker in the artistic and cultural life of the 1930s. Far from
singular, Baker's progress is symptomatic of the evolution of music hall
artists of the period. Jean Gabin's career evolved along similar paths.
The son of a comedian, Gabin started as a music hall artist—in Zou
Zou, he sings the number "Viens Fifine" ("Come Little
Josephine")—and subsequently became a star. The queen of the music hall
and French rival to Baker, Mistinguett also starred in numerous films.
Thus, the relation of muse to Pygmalion in the film repeats Baker's
relation to Abatino, the "no-account count" who was her mentor in the
early days of her French career, while Baker's presence in the motion
picture arena reflects a more general evolutionary trend in the French
entertainment scene.
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