Through the twenties and into the thirties, Baker’s art was not simply one of juxtaposition, piecing together a step from Harlem with a Paris costume and an African drummer, but one of inclusivity that expressed the merging of forms from three continents. This was also the operating procedure of Documents as Hollier describes it. The ethnographers were not so much engaging in the juxtaposition or collage of cultural artifacts, but in a kind of classification that eluded restrictive and exclusive norms of classifying. The principle organizing the collection and exhibition of Documents would be that of psychoanalysis—the notion that every detail counts. The ethnographers sought to rehabilitate the lowly, to “show everything,” and “tell it all” in the museum. Yet for Bataille and Leiris, it was the unsayable that remained important; as Bataille formulated it: “everything has to be said … but on condition that everything may not be said.” Baker’s merging of the beautiful and the comic, the exotic and the everyday, can be understood in similar terms: not as a simple collage of images but as the inclusion in her dancing of both choreographed form and elusive formlessness, what Georges Bataille called l’informe. While flouting conventions about the body, Baker nevertheless respected the discipline and distance of the stage; her freedom of movement seemed to “say it all,” but it, too, was based on the understanding that “everything may not be said.”
While the Colin posters ostensibly commodified her as a performer (one had to pay admission to see her dance), and while the banana costume represented the ultimate colonial fantasy, we have to credit Baker’s ability to save something from her commodification while in so many ways submitting to it. We might use the short film that exists of her in the banana costume, along with her comments about how tired she was of this number by the time of the filming, to read into the film a certain resistance to the mercantile decontextualization of the banana. It is tempting to read this image, across the span of more than half a century, by superimposing onto it the slogan from a current publicity campaign in France. “Banane de Guadeloupe et Martinique: Rien ne peut la battre” markets another import from the New World and signals, within the commercial terms of the French market, a certain Antillean resistance. Sometimes a banana is just a banana, and the campaign for Martiniquan and Guadeloupean bananas, on which so many families depend for their livelihoods, reminds us of the symbolic capital of commodities. The film of Baker’s banana dance, seen in the context of this document, allows us to compare Baker across time to the star Antillean athletes who have been mobilized to sell bananas to France, albeit for different reasons.
Baker’s live performances—consumed “on the spot”—should be read against her creation of an exportable image, that of an international cinema star, who could use the medium to transcend the restrictions imposed on live performers and on their public in her home country, as well as to travel through time. The cinematic elaboration of her image, in movement and sound, allowed Baker some resistance to the kind of static representation that effectively made her an art object. Instead, she used cinema—even as it used her—to create a fantasy of naturalness held in place by the apparatus, and to preserve that image of naturalness for another market, a future film public. Baker’s success in film was in understanding, better than most dancers of her age, what cinematography could do for her art. Translating herself, singing, acting, as well as dancing on celluloid, she created representations that demonstrate more of her agency. Dancing for the camera in Paris or on location in North Africa, she was also tapping into the already 30-year-old enterprise of filming colonial “others.”
While Baker’s dancing was in many ways unique, African and African American dancing had been seen in Paris a generation before she arrived, live and in the cinema. Her dancing and acting covered a huge range of styles, from comic clowning and tap, to percussive traditional dance moves, to glamorous theatrical dance. While seen as a “natural” talent bringing a new excitement to the stage, Josephine’s dancing in the Revue Nègre and into the thirties fit into a niche that had been created by such acts as the cakewalking Mr. and Mrs. Elk; the traditional African dance featured at the universal expositions, also seen in early films by the Lumière brothers; and in avant-garde performances by the Ballets suédois that imitated or were inspired by African and diasporic dance forms.
For a European public, the “authenticity” of African dance was as much a cinematic construction as an effect of live performance, and with cinema’s growing popularity, more and more people would see such dance on film. By transferring her live art to film, Baker was working like an ethnographer, linking “authentic” traditional forms such as dance with decontextualized photographic representations. This transposition is what the pages of Documents also did, by printing a photo captioned, “Bessie Love dans le film parlant Broadway Melody” above a photo of West African children titled “Enfants de l’Ecole de Bacouya, Bourail,” reprinted from an album dated 1869-71.
