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.

In Princess Tam Tam, the character played by Baker is a foil to the white man's desire for a white woman. Yet thanks to the autobiographical reference and transitivity at the core of desire, the film also—ironically—makes him a foil to what she embodies: the dancer's talent.[10] A spoof on French colonial films of the period, it offers a ceaseless kaleidoscopic array of "borrowings" from a European colonial bric-a-brac that thinly veils the traces of Baker's earlier stage acts, her former "identity" as an African American.[11] However, dual oppositional readings fail to account for the complexity of the references on which Baker consciously played. To reclaim her African-American heritage privileges her "original" national identity over the one she took on, as well as her gradual "belonging" to French culture. A polarized reading of La Bakaire that opposes, on the one hand the black female body as "subjected" to colonial oppression, the object of voyeuristic desire, and on the other hand, the black woman as an "agent" of transformation is too schematic. Baker's singular combination of eroticism and sensuality, together with a talent for the comic and a foregrounding of the childlike, complicate any interpretation of her reception.

Moreover, the enigma of Woman—at the center of the fascination with Baker—is not to be easily deciphered. That enigma must be read alongside Joan Rivière's groundbreaking analysis of womanliness as a "masquerade."[12] Baker, more than anybody, played on performing, acting, and disguise. In her Mémoires, she admits that this stems from a childhood habit: "I forgot to tell you that one of my earlier habits was to dress up to see what people would say" (M, 43). She also compared the screen to shadows, and its images to "the discolored light of dream" (M, 146), in a strangely faithful rewriting of Plato's myth of the cave:

I suddenly wake up in the middle of the night. The shadows are all out there, those from my childhood, and those from books, and particularly those from my dreams. I get up. I tiptoe. I chase shadows that disappear, that fade under the electric light, in rooms, bathrooms, through closets, from step to step, in the staircases, under beds, in the corners of curtains. Nothing remains but the house lit up from top to bottom like a screen on which shadows go by. [...] From that to the cinema, there is only one step. You will understand why I love—why I adore—the movies. They are the endless play of all shadows, be they sad or funny; they are dreams in black and white. At the movies, I have never seen colors as vivid as I like them. (M, 146)

Although edited and rewritten by journalist Marcel Sauvage, Mémoires relates childhood memories, placing Baker's love for disguise at the origin of her artistic vocation.[13] Her metaphor of the silver screen as dream material in black-and-white is also a clue to the reading of the film in relation to phantasm. The irreducible core of fascination that she exercised can be explained at least in part by the references to her autobiography that made up the intricacies of her elusive private script as she fashioned herself into a popular icon. It also finds its source in the complex relation that Baker embodied in relation to Africa, thanks to her African-American "identity."[14] This interrelation of elements from the personal (her life) with the public image (her celebrity)—the web of self-references, although difficult to unravel—is a clue to her power of attraction.

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)

One of her biographers, Phyllis Rose, notes that her appeal for the French was that they discovered in Baker an "Americanized Africa."[20]

Princess Tam Tam is replete with mirror effects. Max de Mirecourt's name ("look at the court") satirically inscribes specularity at the center of the film, while spirals and endless motions, graphically represented by the hypnotic coils that turn without end in some of the stage scenes, entrance the viewer.[21] The choreography of the "chorus girls" during the maharajah's ball offers continuously self-reproducing motions, falls, and circles, and blends in with the idea of fiction as dream that the novel as fiction installs as the core narrative device. Smoke and incense also function as blending effects to offer dreamlike imagery.[22] The same is true of the waves and sails of the sea in the scene in which Alwina sings in Tahar's boat. The screen and its images exploit ad nauseam the quality of make-believe inherent in the show: they give something to see beyond the reality of life as they mimic the motions of desire.

The filmic image, Julia Kristeva explains, though granted in relation to Alfred Hitchcock and Sergei Eisenstein, is linked to the drive:

At the intersection between the real object and phantasm, the filmic image turns into an identifiable (and nothing is more surely identifiable than the visible) that remains beyond identification: the drive as non-symbolized, not caught in the object—neither in sign nor in language—or, to put it more bluntly, it unleashes aggressiveness.[23]

The film of a theatrical or dance performance doubles its effect, since Baker always exceeds the character she plays in the filmic narrative. In addition, the notion of "fascinating specularity"—that which is both charming and evil—helps to better explain the reaction to Baker as both animal and woman, both devilish and seductive. The motion brings to the fore the physicality of her dance performance and annihilates the frames to push forward the dancing body. After the initial warm-up dance performance among the children, this effect is fully achieved in the bar scene [video] in which Alwina frees herself from the constraints of civilization and dances among sailors and a range of low-life characters that represent the people. Modernism meant revivification at the contact of nature, the people, the African. In the case of the bar scene, the range and location of her motion combine to produce a doubling of that effect.

Princesse Tam Tam: Sailor Bar [Back to text]

Just as the white upper classes took to slumming it in the Harlem nightclubs and jazz joints, French high society—as pictured in the film—would slum it in sailors' joints and bars. Analysts of the racial and colonial imaginary of France in the 1920s and 1930s often fail to note that the film also portrays "the people." Such vignettes of popular Parisian life are recurrent during this period. This inclusion should be stressed as an element that complicates a mere reading of "the French" as all embodying the same degree of colonial arrogance and racist bigotry. In Zou Zou, for example, Jean Gabin, who plays a sailor, belongs to le petit peuple. While taking part in the colonial venture, he participates in it differently than the young engineer of Siren of the Tropics. Class distinctions are also part of the complexity of the portrayal of the racialized and sexualized body within the colonial imaginary.

In Princess Tam Tam, commonplaces about civilization and savagery, nature and culture abound, such as this fragmented dialogue with a gardener that seems crudely out of place. The gardener utters peremptorily: "African flowers are not made for salons," as an answer to Coton's earlier crude statement that "manure is natural." The Orient and the Occident are systematically and simplistically opposed in a cross-satire of civilized man and the fake exotic. When in one of the early Tunisian scenes Alwina joins the aristocratic picnickers, she replaces the salt with sand, spoils the dainty food, and forces the group to abandon its table manners.[video] She plays a trick on the colonists reminiscent of the slave's trickster tales. Then one of the closing scenes, in which the maharajah reveals to Alwina the impossible dream of participating in Western values (as Max de Mirecourt and his wife embrace in a car) while the Orient beckons in the "shape" of Tahar, is comically overdramatic. Alwina must give up on her "desire" to blend into "civilization" through assimilation, and go back to her native land where she belongs. The viewer must remember that this desire is only explicit in the fictional sequence of the film. The film narrative also portrays her as longing for home in her Parisian apartment as she listens to music that reminds her of her country. Indeed, the Parisian apartment contains fake flowers and palm trees, much to Alwina's amazement. True and false, authentic and fake, are stereotypically distributed as attributes of nature or civilization.

Princesse Tam Tam: Picnic at the Ruins [Back to text]

The reviews of La Revue Nègre emphasized Baker's link to the primitive. The fantasy of transformation, metamorphosis, and makeover, which nevertheless leaves the instinctual untouched, is still underlined by reviewers when she becomes a film star: "Today's Josephine Baker owes a lot to the Harlem adolescent imported into Europe: the flavor of the same brutal spices burns under the skin of the educated star, plied to more civilized tricks" (Alexandre Arnoux, Nouvelles littéraires, M, 25). The rhythm of the conga that calls Alwina back to her natural primitive dancing frames the film, as it is featured in the opening sequence, underscoring the title of the film "Tam Tam" or Tom-Tom, another name for the conga, a drum of African origin derived from Congolese makuta drums.[24] The narrative sequence corresponding to the end of the novel thus shows that she must go back and ends on the failure to "educate" Alwina: the spring cannot be tamed. This failure echoes in reverse the earlier failure of the writer whose inspiration has dried up—his wife screams: "Failure, failure, you are a failure"—which once again sets civilization against instinct. A caricature of the failed novelist, Max has written the novels Coeurs en flammes, Ame trouble, and Les Déclassés, whose titles reflect on the (poor) quality and the genre (popular romance) of his writing. In sum, Max's literary success is due to the coincidence of his story's correspondence with the advent of modernism: the savage's revenge on civilization.

The other ending, the film's ending, is a closure that ironically "seals" the fall of civilization in a burlesque mode.[video] "Returned" to Tunisia, Josephine and the exotic Tahar become a couple and have a child together. Tahar throws a clay pot and plays with the infant while Alwina wanders through the colonial villa, given to her by Max, that she has transformed into a chicken coop, where ducks and a donkey impose the reign of the animal and represent the free. Domestic bliss is instituted where it was not expected, as the film started with a Parisian domestic row. The French urban and upper-class plot is relocated in the African landscape. The spoiled aristocrats of the City of Light give way to a Tunisian family idyll. Much has been said about the fact that Baker never ends up marrying the white man in the films that were written to promote her stage success, including in the Mémoires.[25] Baker, however, did marry Jean Lion (1937) and Jo Bouillon (1947) in real life: "As for me, Whites did marry me" (M, 241).

Princesse Tam Tam: Tunisian Squalor [Back to text]

A closer look at the roles of the white men in the films uncovers another narrative. Although the young white man at the center of the films should be the one who actively directs the action, in the three films, the young heir of white civilization (the engineer in love with the ward of the Marquis Severo, Jean Gabin as the sailor who ends up in jail, and Max the failed writer) presents an image of white masculinity strangely damaged by overpowering white females, or in Gabin's case, as Ginette Vincendeau has analyzed, a certain ambivalence.[26] In Sirens of the Tropics, the marquis is a lecher. It is his wife who rules over his colonial affairs and who eventually sails to the tropics with her protégée to have her reunited with her fiancé. In Princess Tam Tam, the wife is a devouring female, a "femme émancipée," or flapper, and the film incorporates a satire of this New Woman of the twenties. She smokes, she flirts, and she drives an automobile.

Max de Mirecourt does not see his work as a novelist as art but rather as a means of showing off in society and proving his talent. Being a writer is a posture, a pose, a social position. This portrayal of Max owes a great deal to vaudeville. When he sits down to write, he flings loose sheets of paper about him, takes off his jacket, puts on his gown and stares at the camera. He is accompanied by an agent, appropriately called "Coton" (cotton), who at one point in the film jokes about being a ghostwriter (un nègre in French). The status of Tahar, the handyman and factotum in the writer's villa, can also be equated to that of a slave. In a literal embodiment of images of slavery, complete with erotic overtones, Max stops Tahar from flogging Alwina, who has introduced herself illegally onto his property. One often encounters Baker's function as a figure of transgression in her films. She is a stowaway (Sirens of the Tropics), and a thief and a beggar when begging is forbidden (Princess Tam Tam).[27] The initial transgression in her native setting prepares the viewer for her inability to bear the constraints of Western civilization in the scenes of her Parisian life. Indeed, she dances in the sailors' bar to be free and to be reunited with the people at large, the poor and the popular. The maharajah earlier made the following ominous pronouncement to Max's wife: "In the Orient, even the most humble has an independence that you do not suspect."

Princess Tam Tam is the only film out of the three, unlike the silent Sirens of the Tropics and Zou Zou, in which the successful performance of the dancer and the singer is mis en abyme as an illusion, or at least a fiction.[28] Max's writer's block leads him to invent a story of jealousy and revenge that aids him in reclaiming his wife's admiration and love. His strategy is successful in so far as he eventually writes a novel entitled Civilization, a book that has fallen off the shelves in his "African" house, now owned by Alwina, Tahar, and their child. He is ultimately portrayed signing autographs for admirers. Max's pathetic literary attempts can thus be read as modernism's essential gesture: the rejuvenation of decadent Western culture at the spring of the authentic primitive. As numerous critics have observed, this gesture of revivification found an unexpected literalization in the figure of Baker.[29] Baker was African American: she did not put on a mask to create that "identity." In other words, the stereotype of the primitive black body functioned in the coincidence between the fulfillment of the modernist desire for novelty and the "reality" of her civilian identity.[30] In the film, Alwina never actually moves beyond Tunisia; she stays put, at home, reclaiming the colony's usurped territory in the shape of the villa. The phantasm of revivification appears for what it is: a phantasm, mere narrative fiction. The film could thus be read as a comment on the way in which phantasm, feeding on its representations of the alien other, may leave that other untouched (the "and why not?" quoted earlier from Baker's Mémoires). Having rekindled his flame for his wife with a fake love affair with a native woman, the writer returns to the vanity of his former life.[31]

The fact that the indigenous female does not write but is written about parallels the production of Baker's autobiographical writings, composed in collaboration with Marcel Sauvage, André Rivollet, and Jo Bouillon.[32] It also reflects on the figure of the illiterate primitive. Yet Baker did write letters, one of which, from the preface to Paul Colin's Le Tumulte noir, is reproduced in Sauvage's first memoirs (M, 29). She co-authored the novel My Blood in Your Veins with Pepito Abatino in 1931 and is pictured as writing a letter to her children in the feature film, the Josephine Baker Story (2001).[33] Other evidence of Baker's lifelong writing habit is the posthumously published, co-authored autobiography, Joséphine, where Jo Bouillon admits to using notes that Baker had gathered over the years with the intention of writing her autobiography: "The folders bulged with notes, reflections, documents, old programs, press clippings, and three hundred pages of the rough draft of an autobiography begun fifteen years earlier."[34]

Princess Tam Tam offers an intriguing writing triangle. The idea of using Alwina as writing material comes to Max de Mirecourt when he is at a loss for inspiration. Coton prompts him to do it. After having complained of how washed out he is, Max regrets that Alwina cannot be found. He thinks about scrubbing her down (décrasser), then educating her. Coton quips: "You've got your novel!" Max talks to Alwina—they are initially depicted standing behind a screen—while Coton writes down their conversations. Alwina is never alone with Max since the secretary must be able to overhear their dialogues. In answer to one of her queries, Coton explains that he is "a nigger" (a ghostwriter, un nègre). He does the work in the place of the other. That equation between Coton's role and Baker's "identity" reverberates for the viewer on the actual exchange between the three protagonists as an answer to the questions: Who creates? Who does the work? Who owns the work? In this interaction, the metaphoric "nigger" (Coton) uses the real "nigger" (Josephine) to produce the work of art of the white nobleman who stands in for colonial power. They could/should do away with him since Alwina provides the material and Coton does the writing, yet Max is the one who signs the autographs (the author) and is the object of Alwina's desire. Coton's later comment, "We could have asked Alwina to come and sign," is an acknowledgement of her role as co-author of the text. Baker's personal situation was the opposite, given that Abatino used Baker's name several times to promote books he had written.[35]

Here, best-selling fiction turns out be the actual transcription of a dialogue with the exotic other. Alwina is literalized into the source of inspiration, and her words are modified to provide the stuff of Max's new "race novel." Her "authenticity" suffices for the fiction to ring true enough to sell. Max also pretends to fall in love with her, seducing her doubly: he steals from her the genuineness of her reactions, and he turns these emotions into profitable material, a commerce that stands in for the exploitation of the colonies by the Empire.

In the short clip entitled "Memoirs," produced to promote Baker's first autobiography in 1927, Marcel Sauvage, the actual ghostwriter of Baker's autobiographies, sits at a desk while Josephine, dressed as Papitou in Siren, comes in to talk to him. Paul Colin, the graphic artist, is filmed drawing her from life (croquer sur le vif) to produce the illustration for the actual book whose cover is shown in the final shot. The short was created to advertise the Mémoires and Colin's illustrations.[36] Baker dictating her memoirs to Marcel Sauvage, while being drawn by Paul Colin, parallels the fictional situation of Princess Tam Tam, which then can serve as a comment on autobiographical genesis.[37] The film scene purports to be authentic when it is actually a staged commercial venture. In comparison, then, the film is mere illusion, given that Sauvage actually went to see Baker and sat down with her to elaborate a text that creates a voice, Baker's, and constructs the myth of the vedette. The actual situation of the interviews is unveiled in Sauvage's preface to the published memoirs:

She was dressed in a pink dressing gown, slippers of the same color. Tall, slim, supple, laughing. (M, 7)

These memoirs have been gathered to this end [to testify to the phenomenon Josephine], but at several occasions, set apart by long periods of time. (M, 10)

In 1926, I would go to Miss Baker's in the evening at 4 o'clock, a time when her maid would wake her up. Miss Baker would tell her story; she would laugh; she would play. As for me, I was taking notes. At the beginning, I went there with an interpreter; then Miss Baker knew sufficient French to speak it; it would then be thoroughly funny—and at times, very difficult. It required numerous visits because Miss Baker does not like to remember. She lives ... her finger points to the floorboard, the floorboard is the present, it is the present ... in the present. (M, 22)

If the two scenes correspond, they also stand in sharp contrast. The main protagonists of the clip, Baker (the star), Sauvage (the writer), Colin (the illustrator), roughly correspond to Alwina (the exotic subject), Max de Mirecourt (the writer), and Coton (the secretary). Indeed, Sauvage is being dictated to, told to write, while Colin's talent is put to task by a jumpy and chirpy model. In the Mémoires, Baker is said to refuse to be seen as a writer. Although she prides herself on having written the preface to My Blood in Your Veins in her own hand, she claims that she cannot picture herself in the role of a novelist: "Pepito even imagined that I could be a novelist [...] He thus wrote My Blood in Your Veins under the cover of my name. A novelist! Can you picture me, sitting down night and day, quill in hand ... ? God knows that I have had other feathers" (M, 240). In Sauvage's introduction, she is said to refuse to write again after her experience with Colin's Tumulte noir: "You don't know what it's like: write? Ooh la la. I dance. I love to dance and I love only that. I will dance my whole life" (M, 8). The real Baker, with Sauvage's help, is busy constructing her myth, whereas Max uses Alwina's utterances as writing material, unbeknownst to her.

Max's phantasm coincides with the making of Baker's myth. Baker the artist has a secretary—a term used by Sauvage in the Mémoires (M, 22)—a writer and journalist of good standing. Max de Mirecourt has a secretary, a ghostwriter, to take down what he dictates. However, the filmic situation of the writer's block means that his creative energy is failing him. Thus, "dictation" must be the theft of the primitive subject's speech, of her parole. In the commercial clip, the one who "steals" could be said to be Colin, who transfers onto paper Josephine's gestures, her motion, her moving body. An amused Marcel Sauvage pretends that he is writing in bold strokes (can writing be filmed?). Thanks to Colin's presence, writing is also equated to sketching: the autobiography could not be complete without the prints (and later, the photographs). Thus, the clip restores partial agency to Baker, whose life is ultimately the subject of the memoirs, while the film suggests that the writer's reliance on the colonial subject eventually leaves the latter out.

Subverting the Orientalist racial overtones of Princess Tam Tam is the constant possibility of refuting the fictional story line with actual autobiographical moments that, granted, are not exempt of their own tensions. These strict overlaps, or coincidences, could be understood, after Barthes's terminology for photography, as incidences of "autobiographical punctum," perceived by the viewer when fiction gives way to biographical data. Strictly speaking, the "punctum" is a detail that breaks the "studium," that undifferentiated investment in something or somebody: "[the punctum] starts from the scene and comes to pierce me." It is a "wound," a "prick, a small hole, a small stain, a small cut."[38] I wish to extend this notion here to allusions, scenes, and themes that strike the viewer as "real": for example, moments in which "Alwina" disappears and Baker the well-known star (and beyond her the woman) comes to the fore. The fictional code vanishes under the impact of the "autobiographical" detail, the "autobiographical" moment, the "autobiographical" sequence.[39]

Alwina's love for animals (M, 40) and children coincides with the real-life Baker, who raised rabbits in her dressing room (M, 75). The monkey climbing the tree in Max's Tunisian garden is a direct reference to Baker's monkey.[40] Baker owned a menagerie and had a pet leopard named Chiquita that was ultimately given to the Zoo de Vincennes. The actual sculptures and sketches shown in the film as part of Alwina's triumph in Paris are obviously tributes made by artists who found in Baker a muse for their talent, and not to a transformed Alwina.[41] The white marble head is followed by caricature-styled drawings, some of them by Colin. The inclusion of this sequence in the film, a sequence that Baker referred to as the "autobiographical sequence," makes the framing device of the film—Alwina as Galatea to Max's Pygmalion—cave in, to the benefit of the Pygmalion story that Pepito Abatino actually wrote by his mentoring of Baker. The framing and the framed reciprocally alter each other. The core of desire that initiates artistic creation contaminates and is contaminated by the real-life story.

Other moments can be seen as direct allusions to Baker's lifestyle: she had a car and was a hopeless driver. She is shown at the opera, at the races. Baker owned a horse called Tomate. A photograph shows her in satin clothes riding a horse and competing with a jockey. The painting that the maharajah acquires in the film is an actual portrait of Baker. Other elements belong to a wider autobiographical script that the numerous memoirs help to reconstruct, albeit while introducing inaccuracies and pregnant silences. Baker was the symbol of the new woman, the garçonne, much like Max de Mirecourt's wife. The dance routine in the bar belongs to the star's earlier repertoire. It is a mixture of different dance steps that can be traced back to Baker's dancing career, first on the black vaudeville circuit in America and then on Broadway. A vestige of her difficult childhood, her love for food is also reported in her Mémoires, featuring African American recipes. One popular anecdote describes how she was once found naked in her dressing room eating lobster with her hands (M, 75). When Coton tries to find her to introduce her to the press, Alwina is shown eating rice with her bare hands and stuffing it disgracefully in her mouth.

If colonial overtones cannot be fully erased by these autobiographical references, the motion of come and go between the fictional—which, one must remember, is cast as a comedy and a satire of high society—and the autobiographical complicates the reading of the film. It disrupts the binary opposition between object and subject, or rather, between being mere "material" in the words of the other and being the author of one's own life. The final word—the ending of the 1949 Mémoires—belongs to Baker herself: "Americans had the idea of making a film out of my life. And they had asked Lena Horne to play the role of Josephine, quite simply.... Americans are like that. But I am the one who will play the film of my life" (M, 299). Princess Tam Tam's structure, with its embedded narrative directly relying on Baker's actual life transformation, proves that. In 1935 she starred in a film that explored the fictional potential of her life story and foregrounded her role as the ultimate performer of her own destiny. The fiction at the heart of the plot exposed the Pygmalion story as a phantasm, a scene in which desire (of the other) could readily lead to the reversal of the positions of foil and foreground.

Endnotes

1. The quotations are from the following edition: Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker, collected and adapted by Marcel Sauvage (Paris: Dilecta, 2006), hereafter referred to as M. The translations are mine. Princesse Tam Tam was directed by Edmond T. Gréville (Arys Production, 1935). All references to Princess Tam Tam are to the 2005 Kino version. [Return to text]

2. Aouina, the French transcription of the Arabic, is spelled "Alwina" in the Kino DVD version. That the name has been chosen on purpose is made clear by a reference in the film to Alwina as a "source of trouble" by Coton. See Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image (Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 95. [Return to text]

3. A la page means somebody who follows the fashion of the day according to the books. [Return to text]

4. Freudian terminology is used throughout the text, and "phantasm" is consequently defined in light of Jean Laplanche, J.B. Pontalis and Gilles Deleuze's work as a "scene." The evolution of the Freudian notion from a real seduction of the daughter (the seduction theory) to a construction is crucial to the understanding of the concept. Phantasms of seduction are disguises. See Laplanche and Pontalis, "Phantasme originaire, phantasme des origines et origines du phantasme" Les Temps modernes 19 (1964) 1833-68; English translation: "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality," The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 19:1 (1968) 1-18; Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 1968); Logique du sens (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1969). Alwina's seduction by Max de Mirecourt is the phantasm transcribed in his novel. [Return to text]

5. See Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 1980), p. 17. See also Claudine Raynaud, "Visual and Textual Selves" in Peter Vernon, ed. Seeing Things: Literature and the Visual, Papers from the Fifth International British Council Symposium, GRAAT 19, Tours: PUFR, 2005, 45-59. [Return to text]

6. Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 1980), p. 54. [Return to text]

7. On the notion of star and stardom in French films of the period, see Claude Gauteur and Ginette Vincendeau, Jean Gabin: Anatomie d'un mythe (Paris: Editions nouveau monde, 2006). [Return to text]

8. Elisabeth Coquart and Philippe Huet, Mistinguett: La Reine des années folles (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996). [Return to text]

9. Her preface to Mon sang dans tes veines (Paris: Isis, 1931) explains that the heroine Joan would have preferred the country of Devotion (le pays du Dévouement) to the pearls and diamonds showered on her: "While biting into fruit stolen here and there from large baskets, Joan and I made a thousand plans to escape along the big river, and to flee an unjust continent. ... We would reach a country where they would treat us like fairy tale princesses. We would dance, we would sing, covered with diamonds, pearls, and feathers, under lights much brighter than African suns" (p. 6, translation mine). [Return to text]

10. My analysis runs counter to Phyllis Rose's comment: "If in real life it all began with desire, in the film versions of her transformation, all traces of desire are erased. Neither Zou Zou nor Aouina, the heroine of Princesse Tam Tam, is responsible for her own change. Each is the passive object of the other's activity." Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 164. [Return to text]

11. See Andy Fry's reading of Baker's performance in Offenbach's La Créole in view of the changes made by the librettist to use the opera as a shrine for Baker's talent: "Du jazz hot à La Créole: Josephine Baker sings Offenbach," Cambridge Opera Journal 16: 1, 2004, 43-75. See also Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, Josephine Baker: Image and Icon (St Louis, Missouri: Reedy Press, 2006); Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image (Champaign-Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2006). [Return to text]

12. Rivière, Joan. "Womanliness as Masquerade." The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929) in Formation of Fantasy. Eds. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (New York: Methuen, 1986), 35-44. [Return to text]

13. Marcel Sauvage was a journalist and a writer who claims that he harbored some "affection" for the black world in the preface to Pierre Massoni's Haïti, reine des Antilles (Paris: Nouvelles éditions latines, 1955), p. 8. He is the author of Les Secrets de l'Afrique noire (Paris: Grasset aventures, 1981). Only a close look at the manuscript, if available, might help assess what was Baker's and what was Sauvage's own import to what the readers are given here as Baker's voice. One knows that her opinions on World War II were excised from the Mémoires and that she had a quarrel with Sauvage at one point in their collaboration. [Return to text]

14. See Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): "The plot is a metaphor for Baker's own story; it echoes the revivification trope underlying the dynamics of primitivism" (p. 108). [Return to text]

15. Biographies also mention Tangiers as another possible location. [Return to text]

16. Baker mentions that she was often taken for an Arab in Tunisia: "Between takes, people hail me in Arabic, and naturally, I understand nothing. They became quite aggressive at times. I questioned our interpreter who informed me that the Arabs, convinced that I am one of them, wondered with certain vehemence why I didn't answer them. This proves how well cast I have been." Joséphine Baker and Jo Bouillon, Joséphine (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1976), p. 143, translation mine. English translation by Mariana Fitzpatrick, (New York: Marlowe and Company, 1988), p. 100. [Return to text]

17. Tahar is named Dar (house in Arabic) in the subtitles of the Kino version. [Return to text]

18. The French established numerous counters in India in the 16th century (Pondichery, Zanzibar, Chandernagor), and their influence prevailed over a large part of India's territory in the 18th century. [Return to text]

19. Joséphine Baker and Jo Bouillon, Joséphine (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1976), pp. 100-101. [Return to text]

20. Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 18. [Return to text]

21. Alexander Calder's iron-wire sculpture of Josephine Baker (1927-29) also features a coil at its center and for the breasts. [Return to text]

22. These two stage props often act as transitions between sets. [Return to text]

23. Julia Kristeva, La Révolte intime (discours direct): Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse. (Paris: Fayard, 1997), pp. 136-137 (translation mine). [Return to text]

24. The congas used in Cuba are called the tumbadoras. From African instruments of Ashanti, Fan, Bantu and Yoruba origin, they are the product of the creolization that derives from the migration of African peoples during the slave trade. These instruments, like many other percussion instruments, have benefited from a considerable number of improvements to achieve the desired form and tension. [Return to text]

25. "If I don't get love, I will get a name ... Bird of the Islands" (M, 158). [Return to text]

26. Claude Gauteur and Ginette Vincendeau, Jean Gabin: Anatomie d'un mythe (Paris: Editions nouveau monde, 2006), pp. 232-239. [Return to text]

27. In Zou Zou, Jean Gabin is the one who ends up in jail. [Return to text]

28. Baker also starred in a fourth film, The French Way (1945). [Return to text]

29. See Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000); Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Michel Fabre, "International Beacons of African-American Memory: Alexandre Dumas père, Henry O. Tanner and Josephine Baker" in Geneviève Fabre and Robert O'Mealy, eds. History and Memory in African American Culture (New York: 1994), 122-129; Terri Francis, "Embodied Fictions, Melancholy Migrations: Josephine Baker's Cinematic Celebrity" MFS, Vol. 51, 4, Winter 2005, 824-844. For the more specific literary context, see Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writer's Landscape (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois, 1998); Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France 1840-1980 (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). [Return to text]

30. See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). [Return to text]

31. Josephine Baker thought that she should have married the maharajah. She claims that Pepito Abatino is responsible for the ending. Baker is reported as having a love affair with a real maharajah. [Return to text]

32. Here is the list of the memoirs and autobiographies: Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker, recueillis et adaptés par Marcel Sauvage avec 30 dessins inédits de Paul Colin (Paris: Kra éditeur, 1927); Les Voyages et aventures de Joséphine Baker par Marcel Sauvage (Paris: Editions Marcel Sheur, 1931), Préface de Fernand Divoire, avec photos et dessins; André Rivollet, Joséphine Baker: Une vie de toutes les couleurs (Grenoble: B. Arthaud, 1935); Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker, recueillis et adaptés par Marcel Sauvage (Paris: Correa 1949); Jacques Abtey, La Guerre secrète de Joséphine Baker (Paris: Siboney, 1948). Josephine Baker, Jo Bouillon and Piet Worms, La Tribu arc-en-ciel (Paris: Opera Mundi, 1957). [Return to text]

33. It may be the 1968 testament letter referred to by Bonini in La Véritable Joséphine Baker (Paris: Pygmalion, 2000), p. 279. [Return to text]

34. Josephine Baker and Jo Bouillon, Joséphine (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1976), p. xii. [Return to text]

35. Collaborative autobiography always poses the vexed question of authorship. See Philippe Lejeune, Je est un autre: L'autobiographie de la littérature aux médias (Paris: Seuil, 1980). [Return to text]

36. On the artistic relationship between Colin and Baker, see Karen C.C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen Through Parisian Eyes," Critical Inquiry 24 (Summer 1998), 903-934. [Return to text]

37. See Claudine Raynaud, "L'Espace autobiographique et la construction d'une vedette de music-hall: Les mémoires de Joséphine Baker." Unpublished paper, "Genèse et Autobiographie," ITEM-CNRS, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, 16 January 2007. [Return to text]

38. See Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 49. Within the scope of this paper, I can only allude to some of these overlaps. [Return to text]

39. For a more thorough analysis of the generic implications of this effect, see Claudine Raynaud, "Les Mémoires et les films de Joséphine Baker ou l'espace autobiographique comme construction en miroir." Unpublished paper from the Conference "Self-Writing in the Americas," Université de Versailles-St Quentin, 20 June 2007. [Return to text]

40. It was also a nickname for Baker in her earlier career. [Return to text]

41. Baker is associated with Cubism, Primitivism, and Surrealism and, in addition to Alexander Calder and Paul Colin, with the following artists: Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Kees Van Donger, Le Corbusier, Man Ray, Henri Laurens, Tsugouharu Foujita, Georges Rouault, Marie Laurencin, Louis Aragon, Adolf Loos, and Colette. Photographers, architects, and haute-couture designers also found in her a source of inspiration. [Return to text]