Claudine Raynaud,
"Foil, Fiction, and Phantasm: 'Josephine Baker' in Princess Tam Tam" (page 4 of 10)
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]
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