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Claudine Raynaud,
"Foil, Fiction, and Phantasm: 'Josephine Baker' in Princess Tam Tam" (page 3 of 10)
Princess Tam Tam is partly set in Tunisia, where Baker plays a
humble, carefree, penniless, and childlike shepherdess.[15]
She steals an
orange in a market. Max de Mirecourt buys the whole basket and hands it
to her. She runs away with a flock of children in her wake. Later,
dressed in a Roman toga complete with a brooch, she dances at the summit
of a Roman amphitheater. It must be noted that the film was shot on
location courtesy of the Services de propagande de la
Résidence Générale, the Tunisian colonial
authorities. As such, it participates in the French colonial venture,
offering idyllic visions of Roman ruins (Dougga) with aloe plants in the
foreground, aristocrats going on a tour with a local guide and
picnicking in the open air, and the local color of the market scenes.
The numerous ironies of the film may originate in that first "native"
geography: the market scenes belong to the genre of the "documentary,"
the Arabic spoken by one of the vendors is "authentic," the street
urchins are not actors, and the colonial imaginary is embedded in the
ruins of the Roman Empire.[16]
Thus the motion of serial embeddedness, or
regress ad infinitum—the profound specularity of the film that
goes hand in hand with its "lightness" as entertainment—might find its
source in this casting of Tunisia as a province of the Roman Empire.
While Alwina/Baker dances steps borrowed from the African-American stage
routine at the core of her repertoire as a dancer, her partner-to-be in
the conclusion of the film, the "indigenous" Tahar, is a black-faced
French actor wearing a tarbush to camp him as the archetypal Muslim man,
the Mohammedan.[17]
Princesse Tam Tam: Maharajah's Ball [Back to text]
The Parisian scene abounds with characters from the French colonial
empire. Max de Mirecourt's wife flirts with the maharajah of Madane to
provoke her husband's jealousy, thus introducing a playful symmetry:
while he fantasizes about the transformation of Alwina into a
parisienne and she in turn falls in love with him, the real
parisienne has an affair with a man from the Orient.[18] In a scene
that features a party given by the maharajah in a luxury nightclub,
constituting one of the major narrative sequences of the film, the
dancers—and an intoxicated Alwina—break into the conga.[video] The
choreographies are a mixture of French music hall, the American
tradition of the revue and its innumerable chorus girls, and popular
Brazilian music. The bustling hybridity of the product, as well as the
assemblage of ready-made objects from the colonial image-repertoire, is
suitably dazzling. Tunisia itself metonymically stands in for Africa and
the savages. Baker explains:
One of the things that I particularly enjoyed about
filming Princess Tam Tam was the chance it gave me to introduce the
conga to France. Not that the conga had anything to do with Tunisia; it
was a dance enjoyed by the slaves after their work was done. We were all
convinced that it would be the rage in Paris that winter. What better
way to keep warm?[19]
This display of a plurality of colonial locations directly
corresponds with the fact that Josephine Baker, a black American of
mixed origins—white, Native American, and black, if we are to believe
her numerous autobiographies and biographies—could be cast as an array
of colonial female subjects: West Indian, Tunisian, Tahitian, African,
and Arabic. She could also sing Vincent Scotto's 1906 number, which was
part of Mistinguett's repertoire, "Ma Tonkinoise," and thus include
Le Tonquin/Indochina within the ever-expanding boundaries of the French
territories that she could represent. At the same time, Baker's
"Americanness" and her "blackness" were other facets of her persona of
difference that allowed her to supersede the French popular stars of the
music hall, Mistinguett included. There were other black female
performers at the time, such as Maud de Forest, Florence Mills,
Bricktop, and Benga, but Baker outshone them. In other words, her
exoticism, based on something perceived as escaping the French empire,
was all the more alluring. In addition, her belonging to two countries
("J'ai deux amours") and her adoption by the French was a comment
on American racial politics. In effect, her "identity" became
increasingly blurred with each of the disguises she put on—with each of
the roles she performed. Her national origins, her date of birth and her
lineage—in short her "civilian" identity—was lost, veiled and displaced,
yet it remained as a vanishing point. The following lines from her
Mémoires are typical of her counter-pointing the way in
which art critics viewed her:
In the magazines and newspapers of Berlin, they wrote
that I was a figure of contemporary German expressionismus, of German
primitivismus, etc....
They are funny.
And what does it mean? I was born in 1906, twentieth century.
Alles für Josephine.
Funnier and funnier. And why not? (M, 121)
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