Black Diva

Josephine Baker: Black Diva in a White Man’s World

Directed by Annette von Wangenheim

This
year’s African Diaspora International Film Festival (Nov. 26-Dec. 14) begins with Josephine Baker: Black Diva in a White Man’s World, a
remarkable documentary that proves the Festival’s purpose. Director
Annette von Wangenheim examines the career of the black singer-dancer
from St. Louis who went to Paris in 1925 as part of Revue Negre au Music
Hall and had a huge effect on Europe during the same period America
circumscribed its black performers. 

Against
footage of Baker performing her famous half-naked dance in a banana
skirt, biographer Phyllis Rose explains, “She fit into the French
preconception. She was [seen as] direct from Africa but she had nothing
to do with Africa.” That description of cultural diaspora pinpoints the
irony of of post-colonial global significance—a phenomenon that is
still relevant to how black performers are seen and understood.

Wangenheim’s
remarkable selection of film clips and informed interviews show Baker
as a vital and irresistible young performer much like today’s pop music stars. But she was
in the crucible of making historic social advances that required
personal expense and personal revolution—not just self-exposure but a
commitment to expressing one’s true social, existential condition. In
this context, even some of the familiar interview subjects—Arthur Mitchell,
Maurice Hines, Carmen de Lavallade and Elsa —become
distinguished witnesses to the experience of diaspora and what it means
artistically and politically. Deep-voiced choreographer-designer
Geoffrey Holder calls Baker “a liberated woman, and it was not a time
when woman could do what they pleased” and ranks her advances with the
great ladies of theater, art and dance, Georgia O’Keeffe and Martha
Graham.

In a
radio recording, Baker admits, “Many years I wasn’t proud to be American-born. I was hurt because I was born a Negro and I wasn’t allowed to be
the real American I wanted to be.” Her son Jean-Claude Baker (one of
Baker’s 12 multiculti adopted children) relates how Picasso, Gertrude
Stein and Cocteau “crowned Josephine the first black sex symbol of the last
century.”

But
the film goes deeper, tracing Baker’s life story and showing how her
progression from entertainer to political being was almost unavoidable.
It can now can be understood as inevitable—given Baker’s and our own
modern political awareness. Wangenheim makes possible a full
appreciation of Baker, from her dazzling, groundbreaking stage and film
performances (including a color silent comedy titled Plantation), her
work with the French Resistance during WWII, her activism in response to
the Emmett Till murder and even her address at the 1963 March on Washington
during the Civil Rights Era: “I’ve been waiting for this moment when
salt and pepper come together.” In a letter of appreciation, Martin
Luther King Jr. wrote: “You will remain an inspiration to generations
yet unborn.”

Baker’s
diaspora significance was summed up by her theme song “J’ai deux amours
(I Have Two Loves)” described as “the song of a displaced person,
somebody who lived in two worlds.” But it was also a klieg-lighted
version of W.E.B. DuBois’ insight about the black American’s “double
consciousness.” Baker offered a spectacle that even challenged her later
career when she returned to the U.S. as what Rose calls a “very
Parisian, Frenchified, elegant performer”—a plumed, bespangled oddity,
yet the crucial missing link between the upwardly mobile struggles of
Billie Holiday, Ethel Waters and Diana Ross and Beyoncé. This woman,
this film, this festival symbolizes diaspora as more than just
anthropology.