Claudine Raynaud,
"Foil, Fiction, and Phantasm: 'Josephine Baker' in Princess Tam Tam" (page 9 of 10)
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.
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