What Does Beyoncé See in Josephine Baker?:
A Brief Film History of Sampling La Diva, La Bakaire

Beyoncé captures Baker’s burlesque without—significantly, and thankfully—attempting an imitation of Baker. For example, Beyoncé’s hairstyle does not copy the short lacquered flapper cut with the distinctive curl on the sides and/or forehead. Neither does Beyoncé mix comedy into her routine the way that Baker did, although there is some, nor does she attempt to revive all of Baker’s moves, which include crossing the eyes and doing the Charleston within a series of quickly changing kicks, turns, bends, and slides. Instead, Beyoncé’s hairstyle is composed of long, brown curly waves that bounce along with her movements, which blend selected Baker moves with Beyoncé’s hip-hop repertoire. Beyoncé strategically samples Baker’s famous costume and dance practice (speed, Africanisms mixed with older and new American dance) as she remixes her 1920s aesthetics for contemporary audiences.

Although Beyoncé’s quotations, evocations, and translations of Baker marked a change in her tendencies as a performer, her innovation fits into a history of artists sampling Baker in their work. Baker citations have appeared in several films, including the early French comedy Hallucinations of a Fireman (1928), in which Baker appears as herself opposite a fireman. When he first appears, he is already bumbling and drunk, but he is further undone by his own fantasies. An early example of French erotic film, the piece shows the fireman imagining that both men and women transform themselves into nude white women. Traversing the city, the fireman descends to the subway. When an attendant reproaches him for an unclear infraction, he responds by re-imagining her as Josephine Baker. Though Baker appears as herself, her performance occurs in a fantastical realm, complicating what might have been a straightforward cameo appearance.¹ Even playing herself, she enters the film through another character’s fantasy. This early film presentation of Baker establishes her as a fantastical figment—a role she would reprise in subsequent work. More significantly, by making fantasy her entrée into the film, Hallucinations illustrates Baker’s cinematic grammar—that her persona is constructed through a structure of looks and intersecting fantasies.

Movies that do not include the living Baker’s literal physical presence in them foreground the interplay of subjectivities that constitute Baker in a different way from those that do so. The Baker telebiography, for instance, which is revealing from a number of perspectives, is a transitional piece in the trajectory I am building. It recalls Baker’s life through Lynn Whitfield’s performance in The Josephine Baker Story (Brian Gibson, 1991) but it can be understood as a show about a certain kind of glamour and artistry in colonialist and segregationist contexts. Or it is perhaps a cautionary/celebratory tale about ambition, launched from an account of Baker’s rise, fall, and comeback. Seeing the events in Baker’s life and how they affected her played out by an actress, opens up space for Baker’s story to find a context broader than the entertainer’s specific career. Whitfield brings to the piece her own transformation from an actress to a multidimensional entertainer into Baker’s persona. Her performance represents Baker’s biography on one level, while on another it is an imaginative work, authored not by the director or screenwriter but by Whitfield.

Baker starred in four feature films² and was featured in a variety of newsreels, television specials, and concert footage. The motion pictures in which Baker starred function, like the films that quote her, as filmic close analyses of her persona as much as they are the particular stories, which may not concretely concern Baker. The filmic citations, like Beyoncé’s tribute, help to conceptualize Baker because they allow us to envision patterns across Baker’s performances. From the samples and attention to all of Baker’s films, we can see that she plays characters that are very similar to her early music-hall persona: exotic, naïve, and given to seemingly spontaneous singing and dancing. These movies’ narratives are structured around the transformation of Baker’s character from a naïve, exotic, talented, and anonymous person to an acclaimed exotic music-hall star. Baker’s films tend to retell her own transformation from dance novelty to recording artist and film actress, and they encode an account of Baker’s stardom. Precisely because of the ways in which Baker’s authorship is fractured by the participation of screenwriters, directors, and co-authors, the imperative becomes looking carefully at what Baker does, what her film stories are, how she delivers her lines, and what settings she inhabits. Sampling effectively does some of that work by isolating particularly distinctive characteristics in Baker’s performance.

Art historian Griselda Pollock characterized Baker’s central conflict as the effort to author a self between invisibility and excessive visibility. In The Josephine Baker Story, she said, we see Baker negotiating among her subjectivity, embodiment, and performance.³ Indeed, characteristic of cinematic grammar, Baker’s subjectivity, her performance or her “looked-at-ness,”⁴ is not merely her presentation, but an interaction between her presentation and perceptions of her. Cinema, an art of editing and gazes, implies a relationship of looks and subjects, so that if Baker is seen, she is being looked at. The concept of Baker is as much about her as it is about those who look at her—whose fantasy is she? Thus her image, perhaps her self-image, competes with, if it does not directly complement, the images and their attendant desires projected unto her by her audiences. In any case, the cinematic Baker is a relationship of looks, fundamentally, between who is displayed and who observes. Baker cannot be fully understood in isolation, as though she is in a still photograph. If she is in a still photo, its place in a semiotic field has to be analyzed, and if she is in a film, she is already in a semiotic field that has to be detailed, textualized, and laid bare in order to examine the connections between shots and between sequences. If Baker’s central conflict is that of invisibility versus excessive visibility, then her underlying structure is true to that of the cinema. Her conflict cannot be generated without a looker, and a cinematic analysis examines exactly the structure whereby a Looker and a Looked-At create a performance through the interplay of gazes. The figure of Baker is a cinematic phenomenon in a fundamental structural way.

1. This sequence shows both the Baker and fireman characters in a fantastical realm. However, Baker is sometimes shot theatrically rather than from his perspective. This subtle shift may be the grounds to consider the ways that Baker’s owns her own performance within the fireman’s fantasy. [↩]
2. Ètiviént, Henri and Mario Nalpas, Siren of the Tropics, France, 1927. Allégret, Marc, Zou-Zou, France, 1934. Gréville, Edmond T, Princess Tam-Tam, France, 1935. Baroncelli, Jacques, Fausse Alerte/The American Way, France, 1945. [↩]
3. Griselda Pollock’s ideas as represented here were delivered at An International Symposium on Josephine Baker. St. Louis, Missouri. Sponsored by The Sheldon Art Galleries. April 28, 2006. [↩]
4. The term “to-be-looked-at-ness” is drawn from Laura Mulvey’s usage in her essay, “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema.” [↩]