Is this not also a use value on exhibit, in its Sunday best; a concept of proper femininity that works from St. Louis to Paris? Belying the image of the primitive, this gesture suggests that there is no “natural” movement that is not also constructed, conscious of context. The bird outfit and the birdcage may be someone else’s idea, but what Baker makes her own, with her hand on her skirt, is the idea that she submits to the machinery of the industry and is fully aware of its liberating and essentializing powers. Through her use of cinema, as documented in her memoirs, she seems to transcend the imposition of the still frame and the pose, the stereotypes created for national, colonial, and commercial interests, and the fixity of the “cliché.” If she embodied and sold the concept of the bananas or whatever else her managers dreamed up for her, she also invented herself as a producer of images. In the words of the contemporary dance critic Andre Levinson, “Her personality exceeded the genre.”
Despite their apparent freedom of movement, professional dancers are always trying to negotiate some agency within the frameworks that present them as bodies on display. Is the cinema less commodifying than a still image? One part of the answer is that Baker is playing herself; this is how the actor functions in cinema, as Walter Benjamin points out in his essay “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” But it can also be seen—as Benjamin argues—as the progressive shift of the means of production, the progressive opening up of authorship, to the actors in film playing themselves. Baker understood, better than other dancers of her generation, how cinema could translate dance from the stage, how it reaches across time and space, the ways in which it allowed her image to travel, and its effectiveness in reaching an unsegregated audience of the future, the focus of so much of her life, the very children she was clowning for and with.
The “use value” of Josephine Baker refers not to the use value she might have come to represent as an icon, but to the use value she creates, or re-creates, by revalorizing moves through their displacement and recontextualization across continents and then into a cinematic space. In a tiny gesture, apparently thoughtless, as well as in the broad strokes of her liberating movement, she creates a naturalness that is crafted for and by cinematic technology. While negotiating the stardom constructed for her by the industry and the apparatus, Baker maintains an aura of authenticity reserved for modern dance in the face of machine culture. That she does so while herself “submitting to the machine,” in Leiris’s phrase, points to the complexity of a modernist formulation of naturalness held in place by the industry’s massive machine.
This paper is developed from Felicia McCarren, Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Stanford University Press, 2003.
