To Stockholm, with Love: The Critical Reception of Josephine
Baker, 1927-35
Habel, Ylva, 1964-
Film History: An International Journal, Volume 17, Number 1, 2005,
pp. 125-138 (Article)
Published by Indiana University Press
DOI: 10.1353/fih.2005.0003
For additional information about this article
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Film History, Volume 17, pp. 125–138, 2005. Copyright © John Libbey Publishing
ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America
To Stockholm, with Love:
The Critical Reception of
Josephine Baker, 1927–35
!"#$%&
Ylva Habel
Introduction
he Swedish people demonstrate a longstanding fascination with the exotic even if as a nation
their imperialistic ambition has been relatively
limited when compared with with many other
European countries. As a 12-year-old, the minor
regent Karl XII kept a ‘blackamoor’ page in 1694. This
seems to have set off a veritable craze for keeping
black boys as pages or jesters among the Royal
family and members of the court, a trend that lasted
well over two centuries.1 One of the most well-documented instances of a black presence on Swedish
soil was F.A.L.G.A. Couchi (1750?–1822), who was
taken as a boy from the Caribbean island of Saint
Croix and given as a present to Queen Lovisa Ulrika
in 1760. He became the object of a Rousseau-like
experiment in free upbringing by the doting Queen
and her entourage, and quickly received the nickname ‘Badin’ for his unruly behaviour.2 His life and
adventures in and around the Swedish Royal Family
were chronicled by M.J. Crusenstolpe in the six-volume, The Blackamoor, or The House of Holstein-Gottorp in Sweden (1840–44), where Badin appears at
the margins of the narrative as a demonic and scheming court jester.3
Edvard Matz claims that many of the letters,
memoirs and diaries of the eighteenth century testify
to an outspoken interest in ‘blackamoores’ and ‘Negroes’, especially in Stockholm. They were brought
to the capital by transatlantic trading companies
such as the East India Company, and became welldocumented local sights.4 According to various accounts and portrait paintings of these young blacks,
they were frequently dressed in oriental, colourful
costumes, and sported by their masters as exclusive
possessions.5 Frequently, they were both the objects
T
of, and providers of entertainment; one of Badin’s
responsibilities, for example, was to handle laterna
magica shows for the Queen’s guests.6
In an oft quoted passage in Black Skin, White
Masks, Frantz Fanon describes his presence on
French soil as hypervisualised. He imagined himself
being doubled, even tripled by the way he was
constantly made to appear as an exception among
the white Parisian majority.7 To draw an anachronistic parallel, a similar hypervisibility may have framed
these exceptional blacks’ daily experience, yet their
spectacularised existence in Stockholm also entailed various degrees of independence and integration into the social fabric of the city. They were, for
example, baptized and in some cases married into
Swedish families. Badin married twice, and enjoyed
the protection of the Royal Family until his death in
1822. During the following hundred years, more diasporic blacks came to Stockholm but, since they
were few in number, their presence remained exceptional and repeatedly visualised, first in portraits and
later in photographs and films.8
This essay takes the instance of Fanonian
‘overpresence’ as the point of departure for a discussion of white fascination with blackness as epitomised by the revue star Josephine Baker who was
celebrated by Stockholm audiences in the late 1920s
and early 1930s. In an essay on the cultural construction and deconstruction of Baker’s star image, Charlene Regester claims that the European audiences
Ylva Habel is a lecturer in the Department of Cinema
Studies, Stockholm University. She completed her
doctoral dissertation, Modern Media, Modern Audiences: Mass Media and Social Engineering in the
1930s Swedish Welfare State, in 2002.
E-mail: ylva.habel@mail.film.su.se
126
Ylva Habel
Fig. 1. Still from
La Sirène des
Tropiques
(1927).
[Courtesy
Svenska
Filminstitutet,
Stockholm.]
of the inter-war period craved black cultural expression, which was regarded as excitingly Other and
reinvigorating: ‘Literary figures, musicians, dancers,
and singers – as long as they were African American
and talented, they appealed to the European. Their
“American-ness” coupled with their blackness created a cultural fusion that was unique and irresistible
to a European populace eager to fill a cultural void.’9
The cultural interest in Sweden certainly had an
investment in this craving for blackness as a revitalizing force.
Elsewhere, I have argued that Stockholm’s
late urbanization and the migration of workers to the
city entailed a cultural climate in which modernity,
both as vision and practice, was constantly re-articulated.10 As I will demonstrate, Baker’s presence in
Stockholm brought an added dynamic to this context. What makes Stockholm interesting as a site of
reception is that it was a comparatively small capital,
both in size and population. Large-scale events,
therefore, had a disproportionately large impact in
the media. When ‘La’ Baker first came to Stockholm
in July 1928, her visit was so widely covered by the
press that it was almost impossible to ignore the
event.
My engagement with the ‘local’ is necessarily
relative since discussion of what may be defined as
local revolves on distinctions between regional and
national, and the continental and global. Guiliana
Bruno, Annette Kuhn, Jan Olsson, Lauren Rabinovitz
and Shelley Stamp have demonstrated that a double
focus on the global and the local is a fruitful strategy
for characterising the specificity of a given cultural
context.11 Such a strategy also helps elucidate in
what ways globally dominant media discourses may
be reinterpreted or appropriated by locally defined
practices and audiences at a given historical moment.
Mediated through the continental and glamorous connotations of Paris, the reception accorded
Baker in Stockholm brought a range of textual and
iconic representations of her blackness into play.
Photographs and images of Baker together with a
cornucopia of press reviews and programmes, including drawings and caricatures, most of them
produced in the 1920s and 1930s, help reconstruct
the discourse that attended her reception in Stockholm. By juxtaposing the commentary that accompanied Baker’s performances on stage and in films
with other types of imagery that circulated in Stock-
To Stockholm, with Love: The Critical Reception of Josephine Baker, 1927–35
holm, we can reconstruct the context of reception for
Baker and establish to what degree it accords with
her more general reception in the 1920s and early
1930s.
‘…She is her own little culture’
When Josephine Baker arrived in Stockholm in the
summer of 1928 as a star of the touring revue, Wien
– Wien – Josephine, her fame preceded her arrival
by at least a year. Swedish newspapers regularly
passed on titbits of information about her adventures
in different countries, as well as reports in the international press concerning her alleged star qualities.
If she epitomised ‘The New Negro’ figure in the
Harlem Renaissance and the Parisian culture of
avant-garde negrophilia, her long awaited appearance in Stockholm seems to have been more associated with a vaguely defined notion of
‘cosmopolitan’ glamour.12
Baker’s first film, La Sirène des Tropiques (Siren of the Tropics, 1927, Fig. 1), had its unexpected
world premiere in Stockholm in early December
1927, creating, according to the Imperial Film Theatre’s newspaper advertisement, ‘Josephine Baker
Fever in Town’.13 If the premiere of this film was
unexpected for critics and audiences, her screen
presence seems to have been much anticipated in
many quarters. ‘With a commendable swiftness’,
critic Tor Burn observed:
Imperial… has delivered a brand new film
programme, ‘Siren of the Tropics’, whose brilliant star is the world-famous mulatta,
Josephine Baker, the Parisians’ adored cabaret idol par préférance. Here, she needs no
further introduction either; audiences know her
well through the weekly and daily press.14
Burn goes on to commend Baker for her sensuous charm and grotesque humour; indeed, her
Papitou is the only enjoyable character in La Sirène
des Tropiques, otherwise a poorly shot and poorly
directed ‘framework for a primitive genius’.15 On this
point, the other critics agreed. One anonymous
writer noted that, contrary to American film narratives
where she would have been cast as a marginal slave
figure, Baker played the leading part in this film. Her
talent and radiant presence alone made the film
worth seeing.16
What is striking in the reviews of the film is the
critics’ almost unanimous pleasure in seeing Baker
on screen, and their delight in her graceful dance
movements and comical contortions. The advertisement in the newspapers for the film’s premiere accordingly emphasised her screen presence,
claiming that she appeared ‘just as in reality’.17 Critics called her ‘agile like a cat’ or a lizard, an adorable
creature with a face of India rubber. The premiere
was packed and many people failed to gain admission.18 Running from December 1927 to mid-July
1928, La Sirène des Tropiques was screened for an
exceptionally long period of time. The film functioned
as a long prelude or even foreplay to the real encounter between artist and audience in the revue Wien –
Wien – Josephine. As the premiere of the revue at the
Oscarsteatern approached, the film was still being
screened in at least three inner city film theatres.19
A few weeks before the opening night, the
newspapers fueled public interest by informing readers of Baker’s tour which had created scandals
throughout Europe. Articles give details of the stink
bombs that had been thrown at her in Budapest,
student protests against her in Vienna, and precautions the Danish police had taken against the anticipated indecent nature of her performance in
Denmark.20 The question was: would scandal also
be inevitable in Stockholm? A cartoon in Social-Demokraten illustrated how the banana-clad and Charleston-dancing Josephine might affect future fashion
in Stockholm, showing a population of men, women
and children with leaves, bananas or feathers around
their waists (Fig. 2).21
Some time later, the diva arrived in the capital.
The critic, Daniel Fallström, described the significance of the event by drawing attention to the celebrities who attended the premiere:
Apparently all of Stockholm had taken their
cars or boats from their summer-houses to
attend this premiere, which has been anticipated with vivid interest. There [at Oscarsteatern] you could spot Prince Wilhelm, tanned
and fit; and from your seat in the stalls you
could nod at Stockholm celebrities.22
Having seen Baker and having been charmed
by her performance, Fallström later claimed that the
fear that Baker was ‘the most serious danger to
European culture’ could now be put to rest. Instead,
he found her to be an innocent girl, displaying her
natural talents in a generous and humorous manner,
all the while amusing herself as much as her audience. Even when her movements ‘transgressed the
bounds of the aesthetic towards the unaesthetic’,
127
128
Fig. 2. Cartoon,
‘Summer Fashion
à la Josephine’,
SocialDemokraten, 18
July 1928.
Ylva Habel
one had to forgive her as she was so ‘childishly
adorable’.23 The reviewer in Social-Demokraten had
seen more libidinous responses from Fällstöm and
the Prince: ‘Fallström appeared to languish and
Prince Wilhelm licked his lips’.24
The reviewer for Dagens Nyheter saw in Baker
a female Huckleberry Finn whose mischievous tricks
on members of the audience charmed all those
present. ‘She’s got it. What is the use of trying to
dissect the tricks of this half-caste on stage? It does
not matter from which corner of the world she comes,
or what skin-colour she has. You could speak of
Negro culture, but that does not capture what makes
Josephine. She is her own little culture …’.25 The
review is a significant example of the way Stockholm
critics were ambivalent in addressing questions of
race. The statement that her skin colour was of no
importance was not unusual, and appeared as a
form of reservation against racialised discourse on
blackness. In a way, the individualizing claim that
Josephine was ‘her own little culture’ simultaneously
evoked and displaced the ascribed significance of
her skin colour.
In Stockholms Dagblad, the reviewer adopted
an enthusiastic if somewhat distanced approach to
the artist, writing that she had brought the house
down, especially in the Jungle number where she
performed her famous ‘African’ dance and climbed
the stage trees clad only in a banana skirt. Yet, the
reviewer found the entertaining qualities of her Otherness were short-lived: even if she was quite charming, her eccentric and exotic esprit soon palled. The
critic hoped, therefore, that Baker would only stay a
few weeks and refrain from opening a permanent bar
in Stockholm, as she had done in Paris with Chez
Joséphine. ‘If culture cannot be saved altogether, let
it at least breath freely for a while. Excuse me, Countess!’26
Across the board, critics demonstrated a
marked fascination with Baker’s body and skin colour. The agility of her body was compared with that
of animals, while the colour of her skin was almost
invariably likened to chocolate. Adoration for her was
expressed through fragmentation, as when SocialDemokraten claimed that ‘Her eyes and teeth competed for the beauty prize’.27 A Fanonian reading of
the impressions her body made on reviewers – a pair
of gazelle legs, rolling saucer eyes and a white smile
– demonstrate how the white gaze exerted the power
to ‘chatter’ the black corporeal schema (here in a
more literal than psychoanalytic sense) and piece it
together according to a ‘racial, epidermal schema’.28
But as is well known, this fragmentation was also an
important feature of Baker’s pranks in which she
would exploit all prevalent black stereotypes to the
full, squinting her big eyes or arching her back to
make her backside protrude in a comically ‘African’
manner. In a biography of Baker, Phyllis Rose claims
that the artist’s self-stereotyping pranks were a form
of defence which spoke of a basic insecurity of
appearance and self-presentation.29
There is an interesting gender aspect to the
doubleness of Baker’s star image, one that is not
limited to this local context. Phyllis Rose draws attention to the fact that in the early stages of her career,
Baker would often make her most stereotypical faces
in glamorous costume: ‘The cross-eyed, goofy, stereotypically blackface grin would become a kind of
signature, even when – most effectively when – she
was glamorously dressed, so that it seemed a
parodic comment on her own beauty, on conventions of beauty, on the culture that had made her
famous.’30 Although Baker was celebrated for her
beauty, it was clear that her looks did not correspond
to Western norms. Her costumes, densely strewn
with strass or sequins, must have filled contradictory,
semiotic functions for the construction of Baker as a
desirable feminine icon. As much as they elevated
her to the status of a sophisticated (white) prima
donna in a conventional sense, they simultaneously
To Stockholm, with Love: The Critical Reception of Josephine Baker, 1927–35
accentuated and ‘textured’ her dark skin, as well as
amplifying the brilliancy of her eyes, teeth and hair.
As Rose claims, the goofy pranks can be regarded
as non-verbalized comments on her construction as
a star, but first and foremost, Baker’s stepping in and
out of character translate as a way of drawing attention to the possibility/impossibility of passing into the
realm of ideal white femininity.
As might be expected, the fascination with
Josephine’s blackness surfaced in all kinds of image-based representations in the newspapers and
publicity material that circulated in Stockholm. Many
of the photos and drawings of her make her appear
as various configurations along a Negroid/primitive
– Parisian glamour axis.31 The mix of the two iconic
discourses is most clearly illustrated in the Oscarsteatern revue programme where a triplet of glamorous photographs of Baker in costume are framed by
comically-drawn, libidinous and Negroid caricatures
that barely resemble her (Fig. 3). A figurative schizophrenia characterises her appearance in the programme, as if she embodies beauty and the beast
all at once in several juxtaposed versions.
The degree to which Baker’s looks and agile
body were considered not only beautiful, but spectacular in Europe is demonstrated by the diversity of
photographs, postcards, artworks, posters and caricatures that depicted her.32 In Paris, Baker was
indeed her own culture, not in the diminutive and
primordial sense imagined by the critic ‘Åb’, but in
sensational manner: in her chateau, Les Milandes,
she later had a wax museum built, the Jorama,
depicting the various stages of her life.33
Baker’s varied appeal was exploited by herself
as well as by others as part of her reception in
Stockholm. During the same year in which La Sirène
des Tropiques was released, she published an interview-based autobiography, Les mémoirs de
Josephine Baker, co-written with Marcel Sauvage
and richly illustrated by the artist Paul Colin. The
images from the book were among those that circulated in the Swedish press at the time of her arrival
in Stockholm.34 With her husband, Marquis Pepito di
Abiati, she had launched several Baker-endorsed
products such as the popular hair-straightening wax,
Baker-Fix.35 The same day as her opening night at
Oscarsteatern, a Josephine-doll was advertised in
the daily press. The doll was 60 cm high, bare-
129
Fig. 3 (above).
Josephine in
costume,
photographic
montage from
Oscarsteatern
programme for
Wein – Wein –
Josephine (1928).
Fig. 4 (top
left). Stomatol
advertisement,
StockholmsTidningen, 24
July 1928.
130
Ylva Habel
chested, clad in the well-known banana skirt, and
could be bought in the toy department at NK
(Nordiska Kompaniet, Stockholm’s major department store). The advertisement for the doll was also
addressed to adults: ‘This funny doll is particularly
amusing as an adornment sitting on the sofa, or as
a car mascot.’36 In the same year, Stomatol Toothpaste produced an animated commercial short (Fig.
4) in which Josephine Baker sung about whitetoothed happiness (acquired through using the
product) while wiggling her banana skirt before
crawling off stage on all fours with her backside high
in the air.37
A characteristic feature of Baker’s representation to which allusion was made in the reviews
was the cultural-sexual ambivalence ascribed to her
glamorously but scantily clad figure.38 By this time,
she had been a celebrated avant-garde icon for
some time in Paris; her blackness as well as that of
other African-American artists, was le dernier cri.39
Having seen the premiere of La revue nègre in 1925,
dance critic André Levinson wrote:
Certain of Miss Baker’s poses, back arched,
haunches protruding, arms entwined and uplifted in a phallic symbol, had the compelling
potency of the finest examples of Negro sculpture. The plastic sense of a race of sculptors
came to life and the frenzy of African eros
swept over the audience. It was no longer a
grotesque dancing girl that stood before them,
but the black Venus that haunted Baudelaire.40
In Stockholm, critics did not pick up on the
avant-garde significance of her blackness. Even if
her skin colour did not pass unnoticed, the central
question in the reaction of the press the week after
the premiere at Oscarsteatern in July 1928 was her
semi-nudity. Since the turn of the century, debates
concerning nudity and nakedness had been controversial issues in discourses on aesthetics, health and
sexuality, and by the 1920s, the interest in (or disdain
for) German Körperkultur had given the issue new
energy.41 Baker’s semi-nudity was frequently
couched in this discourse, although given a racial
slant. A heated debate over her performance, initiated by the daily paper Stockholms Dagblad, took
place shortly after the premiere of the revue. Readers
were asked: ‘Is Josephine a Danger to Culture? What
Stockholmers Say’.42An unidentified clipping, which
includes a letter from a ‘Friend of Sound Entertainment’, reads:
What do we Swedes have to do with this loudly
advertised half-Negro prima donna, who cartwheels and squints her eyes to make a poor
person’s head spin. Don’t we have enough
leg-shows and flirtation in [Ernst] Rolf’s and
Karl Gerhard’s revues, which should make it
unnecessary to import the phenomenon in its
most provocative form, and on top of that, with
a Negress as high priestess residing over the
whole thing? … is there no longer any prohibition in Sweden against showing a woman’s
entire torso?43
Another reader, sympathising with this view,
wrote:
Mr. Editor! My thanks to ‘Friend of Sound
Entertainment’. The Negro dance, Negro music and Negro humour that currently dominate,
not only constitute dangers to our culture, but
serve to testify that it has already been derailed. This is evident to any person who is not
yet a degenerate. If we adjust our tastes to
those of the lower races, it will be the downfall
of our culture.44
A reader signing himself as ‘Unbiased Theologian’, countered such an alarmist response by
answering ‘Friend’ in the following manner:
If we admire a tree, an animal, a lake, we call
this joy of nature. Why should our delight over
the encounter with this deeply natural human
being be interpreted as a sign of the depravation of our times?
An individual artist cannot appeal to everyone
at once. But those who have the capacity to
live in the present and to love its art forms, and
in the best cases, its deep sense of decorum,
should be glad to have known Josephine
Baker, the international stage revue’s most
loveable child of nature.45
Another reader positive to Baker’s show
claimed that a Lutheran and backward-looking mentality inhibited the Swedish audiences from enjoying
entertainment that was ‘continental’ and high-spirited:
Swedes, I hope, are not all missionaries, nonconformist Christians or temperance-dance
advocates. Surely, there must also be people
who have the capacity to view beautiful
To Stockholm, with Love: The Critical Reception of Josephine Baker, 1927–35
women and filled goblets without crossing
themselves or having a fit? Is it so incredibly
dangerous to see an agile, well-built and
healthy human body that we should need to
cry out for help and call the police?46
The image of ‘the continental’ was evoked by
yet another Baker-lover, ‘Friend of Sound Thinking’,
who gave vent to his annoyance at the adversaries’
talk of the degenerating effects of modern culture:
Yet again the pathologically critical and ultraconservative Swedish petty bourgeoisie has
found a welcome object for its more or less
ridiculous outpourings, now as always addressed to a phenomenon belonging to the
realm of modern entertainment. ‘The cultural
danger’ this time is the dark-skinned prima
donna who is a guest in our beautiful capital
at the moment, bringing with her a breeze of
the continent with its exclusive theatre world.
A visit to the Oscarsteatern should be enough
to convince the most fanatic opponent of ‘Negro culture, leg-shows and flirtation’ that these
phenomena appeal to the discriminating
Stockholm public. What sound-thinking person with a sense of the aesthetic – yes, and
maybe even the grotesque – qualities of choreographic art could be offended by the stirring and graceful dances performed by this
dark-skinned child of nature? And when they
are executed by an agile and well-shaped
representative of das ewige Weibliche, no matter if she is of another race or temperament
than ours, modern man surrenders unconditionally.47
While defenders of moral standards claimed
that Baker was a danger to Swedish culture as well
as sexual mores, her defenders saw in her an innocent child whose ‘animal’ agility and ‘naturalness’
were free of erotic innuendo. If the former views
demonstrated an openly racist slant, they often directed their attention towards the question of nakedness rather than race. Regardless of the views
expressed, the articles are interspersed with caricatures of a dancing, topless Baker, or a photo of her
in semi-close-up in a topless costume; in the press,
she dances on and cannot be contained.
As stated in the introduction, Stockholm was
(and still is) a relatively small capital. To a large
extent, coverage of the media events could hardly
pass unnoticed by city-dwellers who went to the
movies and regularly read the daily and weekly press
in the 1920s and 1930s. Consequently, the significance of media events was readily grasped in a
number of ways. A retrospective hypothesis is that
the condensed local dynamic could make the representations of contemporary issues quite intense,
particularly when articulated by Baker’s performance
and cultural status. In this respect, Baker’s performance implies a relatively intimate affair in a small
capital city. On the other hand, if a city can be said
to harbour a collective psychology, the manner in
which some Stockholmers responded indicates an
inferiority complex with symptoms that were expressed in response to, or outright rejection, of the
signs of a distinctly urban culture that occasionally
offered an ‘authentic’ modern and cosmopolitan
form of entertainment.48 Regardless of whether
Baker’s presence was celebrated or berated in the
letter pages of Stockholms Dagblad, popular response ascribed Baker the power to infuse the local
with an element of the ‘continental’, perhaps even
the global. For some people, Baker epitomised a
healthy and expansive local culture; for others, however, her presence implied the threat of cultural
poisoning and the lowering of established values.
From enfant sauvage to chocolate
diva
Six decades of stage and film criticism relating to
Josephine Baker’s reception in Stockholm reveal a
gradual readjustment of address. What is striking is
the never-ending negotiation concerning her artistic
capacities and looks (Fig. 5). In the initial phase, i.e.
the period when Baker first came to Stockholm in
1928, the critics’ interest revolved around whether
her stardom and her potential for creating scandal
should be acknowledged or not. Even if she was
more often praised than not, her artistic qualities
were ascribed more to nature and spontaneity than
to any particular skill (although the balance would
shift towards the latter in her later career). The recurrent, indirect question in the 1920s was: can Baker
be acknowledged as a star and, if so, what constitutes her stardom? In the entertainment magazine
Scenen, the headline of a review read: ‘What and
who is the brown Josephine? A sensational diva – an
impresario product – a stock-certificate – the woman
in Europe!’49 How and according to what cultural
paradigm should her high-spirited singing and danc-
131
132
Fig. 5.
Josephine’s new
image, ‘without
bananas’. Danish
poster for
Prinsesse
Tam-Tam (1935).
[Carson
Collection.]
Ylva Habel
To Stockholm, with Love: The Critical Reception of Josephine Baker, 1927–35
ing be valued? In trying to answer this question, most
critics were on thin ice since their familiarity with
Parisian and African-American stage-based cultural
output must have been limited.
When Josephine returned with stage revues in
1932 and 1933, several critics commented on her
artistic quality by recapitulating their first impression
of her performance in 1928. All agreed that she had
undergone a transformation that had led her away
from her former spirited ‘savagery’. Depending on
the significance they ascribed to this change, they
related her talent to a mix of artistic development and
race. ‘Sminx’ in Stockholms Dagblad wrote:
The advance publicity certainly did not lie:
Josephine Baker has evolved incredibly since
she was here last. Then she was a little darkskinned savage who swung in lianas with bananas around her waist, stuck out her
backside, rolled her eyes and squinted them
so that her eyes reached the root of the nose.
Well, she can still perform those tricks, but they
are only glimpsed now and then, as a reminder
of her former self. Now she is, first and foremost, a serious ballad-singer, fascinating, vibrant with life and intensity. She is wonderfully
free of affectation. The crudely primitive has
gone, but she is still a captivating child of
nature. She sings her songs as if she sang
them spontaneously, for the first time … The
little African with the delicate voice will surely
draw many packed houses at the Chinateatern
during her stay here.50
In this review, as in most other reviews at the
time, child metaphors abound together with allusions to the degree to which Baker had either left
behind or had kept her savagery.51 Dagens Nyheter
noted that her ‘backside still retains those inimitable
facial expressions’ as when she was here last.52 As
earlier, ‘chocolate’ is a constant analogy in descriptions of her:
The chocolate-brown prima donna from Casino de Paris cannot complain about the way
she has been received by our so-called chilly
country on her return visit. The China auditorium was packed from floor to ceiling, and
cheers rose in an even and inspiring crescendo from the diva’s entrance to her last
farewell wave with a long brown arm through
the curtains. … [She] has not changed as
drastically as the advance publicity had promised. She still retains the same proportion of
gamin temperament, but does not lavish it on
the audience as ferociously … Josephine’s
strong and primordial temperament, furthermore, allows her to perform as a tragedienne
to good effect. That, combined with her childish playfulness, her modern, reckless artistry
and the musicality peculiar to her race, all
make it abundantly clear why she has such a
sure grasp of her audience.53
Such responses are typical of the positive
reception Baker was accorded by some reviewers.
For critics who were not so enthusiastic, Baker’s
stardom was not simply questioned, it could be
pulled to pieces at times. In Scenen, a columnist
contradicted a very enthusiastic review by ‘Catherine’ in the same issue. The columnist hardly paid any
attention to Baker’s performance, but gave an acrid
account of her way to ‘success’. The article offered
an entire micro-biography in a mocking tone:
Philadelphia is her first stop. She is employed
at the Standard-Theatre as a ‘Nigger Girl’. The
pay is 10 dollars per week … After a few
months she pops up in New York. No agent,
no theatre wants her. Everybody laughs at her,
saying that she looks like a ‘monkey’. Finally,
a jingle-jangle theatre-owner takes pity on her,
and lets her play in a grotesque number.
But not even here can she endure for long; it
is always the same. Then Josephine gets this
splendid idea: she will dance naked, or halfnaked, only clad in a girdle. Now her success
is incredible. Her beautiful body is an attraction and after a year, she earns 250 dollars a
week. In 1925, a good manager took her to
Paris …
She dances the ‘banana-dance’ and sings,
‘Yes, sir, that’s my baby’ … the next day all of
Paris sings the tune and the theatre is sold out
for several weeks in advance. Josephine now
earns a 1000 dollars a week …
The rest of Europe starts to take an interest in
her … the metropolitan cities offer huge fees
… a Negress is on her way to gaining world
fame, and many think it remarkable …
She comes to Berlin … they commend her
well-performed songs in the revue, her agile
133
134
Ylva Habel
body, but the big success does not come. In
Munich, she is not even allowed to perform.
But Josephine has big plans …54
‘H.S.’ goes on to account for the ways in which
Baker succeeded in creating scandal but utterly
failed to make artistic progress. Considerable space
was devoted to her marriage to Marquis Pepito di
Abiati which the reviewer regarded as a crafty career
move when success did not come her way as quickly
as she had expected. Only towards the end of the
review did ‘H.S.’ mention her recent show:
And now a new Josephine conquers the world
with new numbers but without bananas. Recently, you could see this in Stockholm. The
audience would not leave, and when she finally threw flowers to the enraptured audience
from her dressing room, they practically fought
over them.
Because the poor little Negress from Saint
Louis is now a great artist and a rich wife.55
Arthur Johnson, another critic who was sceptical about Baker’s talent, wrote about her in Filmjournalen, recalling his memory of her new-found
stardom in Stockholm 1928 as a backdrop for evaluating her artistic progress. The tone is characterised
by chilly banter:
Well, here she is again, the Swiss chocolatecoloured Negro child! She who climbed like a
monkey in the jungle of the Oscarsteatern a
couple of years ago, and became just as
famous for the string of perky bananas encircling her waist, has now grown famous for her
new-born, tiny soubrette voice. In those days
[her performance] was nothing less than pure
Nigger joy, displaying the savage’s unwillingness to wear clothes, paired with the woman’s
joy in showing our Lord’s Creation at its best.
If you didn’t know that a Darkie is a child ruled
by primitive impulses and a naive spontaneity,
you can find that out here and now. At our
latitude, such a happy invocation of being has
never been seen before. The arms and legs of
the 23-year-old beauty whirled incessantly, as
if in a celebratory hymn to life. When she stood
on her head with her bottom in the air, her
spiritual side came to its fullest expression.56
Johnson initially praises Baker as the dainty,
chocolate ‘she-animal’ whose well-shaped body he
had seen generously displayed at the Folies-Bergères in Paris. But since then, he claims, Paris has
quickly grown tired of Baker. She has, nevertheless,
responded to this mortification with intelligence and
artistic flexibility, and has succeeded in making a
comeback by refining and reconstructing her artistic
persona with more lavish costume and a distinctly
French singing technique. He goes on to refer to a
friend he met in the vestibule of the Chinateatern after
her première, who spoke delightedly of her as a new,
coloured Sarah Bernhardt. Johnson, finding the
comparison somewhat amusing, observes:
I cannot imagine a more exorbitant homage to
the beauty’s newly fledged chansonette skills
… I can assure him that Sarah will never have
to turn under her simple stone slab … for the
sake of a Negress.
The joy of imitation runs in the blood of the
savage, and even if it doesn’t take much
thoughtlessness to forget that the art of acting
is mere monkey tricks refined through the millennia, one must not mistake primitive drives
with knowledge. It would be going too far, in
celebrating the equatorial region, if you anticipate that in the fullness of time Josephine will
be able to handle more than the spirited lines
of a chamber-maid.
In truth, with a good ear and an even keener
eye, she has learned to imitate the characteristically French chansonette style which, in
and by itself, can be found everywhere. This
said, there is no need to mention Mistinguett,
which would be resorting to more violence
than necessary. Well, that is the Casino de
Paris-Josephine of 1932, who has grown more
mimically aware in the upper region as well,
c’est tout.57
The reviewer ends by paying a condescending
tribute to one of her typical comic stage postures on
all fours: ‘In all circumstances, here is the fitting and
beautiful Swedish homage: the backside crowns the
Glory!’ 58 The irreverent mix of praise, eroticized
fascination and racialised disdain running through
Johnson’s article is interesting since it illustrates how
far he thinks Baker can evolve without overstepping
the limits of her race’s alleged capacities. Among all
To Stockholm, with Love: The Critical Reception of Josephine Baker, 1927–35
the ‘calculated’ turns of her career that ‘H.S.’ and
Johnson claim to expose, her ambition to ‘imitate’
and master the white chanson tradition was found to
be the most provocative. This was a boundary she
should not try to cross.59 As Regester has observed,
Baker’s new voice created a watershed in the evaluation of her talents. Despite the positions taken for
or against her vocal technique, Baker’s voice was
considered an appropriation of white cultural expression, whereby she attempted or actually succeeded
in transcending her ethnicity.60
Critics negrophilically enamoured of Baker
and those not so fascinated by her adopt a similar
vocabulary on many occasions. I would claim that
their rhetoric was premised on an inverted logic of
agency. In the laudatory reviews discussed above, a
significant factor in Baker’s success related to her
specific racial traits. She had learnt to manage an
inherited gift leavened with appropriate Western restraint, partly by refining it, partly by reducing her
former ‘African’ recklessness to a successfully attractive mix. This made Baker appear as a slightly
passive administrator of her talent. Critics such as
Johnson and ‘H.S’, on the other hand, inadvertedly
award Baker a surprising degree of agency and
intelligence, even when putting her down. She is
described as business-minded, smart, and either
cynically or naively capable of exploiting her (natural)
attributes and limited talents to the full. Public relations is a specifically sensitive spot for the critics;
they despise the crass commercialism that was reported on her star build-up. In drawing undeserved
attention to herself, ‘H.S.’ accused Baker of appearing seriously dishonourable.
In due course, Stockholm critics would claim
a certain amount of knowledge about the scope and
cultural significance of Baker’s talents. To some
extent, their response from 1932 onwards shows an
underlying desire for her to stay primitive and childlike. Others saw the very change as an evidence of
Baker’s evolution. Yet, the shared premise was that
her race was a limitation to artistic perfection, a
tendency which Charlene Regester likewise traces in
the white American reception of Baker.61 Drawing
attention to the two critical camps may not add to our
received knowledge concerning the interrelation of
the primitive and the modern, a dynamic in which
Baker was located, but, it is interesting to note the
unanimous remarks concerning her performance
and star persona that arose from both enthusiastic
and critical parties.
The monstrous Josephine: the
critical adjustment from stage to
screen
A few years later, the juxtaposition of Baker’s stage
and screen persona makes yet another interesting
phenomenon surface in the critics’ views of her; on
this occasion, even more distinct with regard to her
looks. That her fame rested in the late 1920s as much
on her grimaces and body movement as on her
beauty and scanty costumes is clearly visible in the
columns and the images that circulated of Baker. At
this point she was nearly always regarded as adorable, regardless of how much she transgressed the
norms of femininity with regard to luxury revues. She
was constantly referred to as the chocolate- or cafécon-leche-coloured beauty, and during her life, her
body (later increasingly corseted) never stopped
intriguing Swedish critics as an attraction in itself. In
discussing Baker’s appeal as a universal ethnic
Other in the Parisian music hall, Fatimah Tobing
Rony exemplifies how critics, commenting on her
energetic performance and appearance, saw her
femininity as both desirable and monstrous, neither
entirely human nor animal. She is described as frightening and enticing, an unstoppable natural force.62
For Stockholm critics, this dramatic interpretation is
totally absent; her ‘savagery’ or ‘grotesqueries’ are
mostly perceived in comical terms.
When the film Zou Zou came to Stockholm in
January 1935, however, something interesting happened the moment critics had the opportunity to
compare her, by now, familiar stage presence with
her screen persona. After seeing the film, they suddenly discovered that she was ‘ugly’ which, however,
did not seem to have lessened her charm. ‘Eveo’
wrote: ‘She plays a part and she does it in an excellent way. Her ugly and agile face can express both
feeling and psychological motivation. She is talented, Mademoiselle Baker’.63 An uncredited writer
in Vecko-Journalen claims that ‘one really likes this
coloured woman with the ridiculous little face and the
beautifully modeled legs’,64 while a reviewer in Social-Democraten discovered that she ‘plays on’ her
body, her voice, her ‘rolling eyes’ and her ‘temperament’, ‘alternately sad, ugly and without make-up,
alternately fair and happy’.65
Part of the explanation for Baker’s perceived
‘ugliness’ on screen may be because critics did not
respond well to the colour change she underwent
between her appearance on stage and on screen.
‘Jerome’ found that Baker certainly had evolved, but
135
136
Ylva Habel
that her skin colour was not flattered by the transition
to celluloid. Furthermore, despite her vivacious temperament, he claimed that she lacked the acting
ability to bring out amorous feelings for her male
counterpart, Jean Gabin.66 In a similar way, the critic
writing for Dagens Nyheter connected Baker’s temperament and expression with her bodily appearance – ‘the lankiness of her body (with the comically
accentuated backside)’ – and went on to express
regret that celluloid did not do her colour justice to
the same extent as it does her acting spirit.67 The
reviewer in Aftonbladet maintained that excepting her
songs, the star did not come out well on film, and
added that this was hardly due to a lack of acting
talent.68
As mentioned earlier, it seems as if critics
found the most intriguing aspect of Baker’s screen
persona to be her virtual presence; she appeared
‘just as in life’ before their very eyes. This counts for
Zou Zou as well. In a way, the critics’ inclination to
draw direct links between the actual presence of
Baker on stage and her screen presence shows that
the fascination with her body was not an insignificant
element. Moreover, this way of responding to the
medium brings associations close to those of a
much earlier period in the history of film when initial
encounters with the ‘liveness’ of the moving images
were, at least in one well-known case, perceived as
an uncanny simulacrum.69 In a similar manner, the
loss of Baker’s desirable bronze colour in film may
have translated as a loss of her organic life and of
beauty.
Apart from the loss of fidelity in Baker’s perceived skin tones, what may have sparked the
change of opinion regarding Baker’s looks? A crossreading of the reviews of the stage revue and of the
film, Zou Zou indicates that medium specificity as
well as the distance from which the spectator sat
relative to the stage or screen may have played a
significant role in how Baker’s image was perceived.
In the transition from the relatively long distance that
separated critics and the stage artist in the revue to
their facing a black and white close-up of Zou Zou in
the film, some transformation had been effected: she
had suddenly grown in scale, had become someone
else. In short, it would appear that Baker’s image had
been transformed from one that was exciting, charming and endearingly funny to one that was, potentially, monstrous.
Conclusion
If Stockholm was a small and peripheral centre of
entertainment in the 1920s and 1930s, its audiences
shared a common European fascination with blackness. As demonstrated in the reception discourse
surrounding Josephine Baker’s early film and stage
career, the Stockholm critics’ interest in her blackness was paired with a more general desire for things
continental. Moreover, her presence imported a new
sense of international energy which initially upset
traditional cultural values.
In the critical reception accorded Baker’s
stage and film work there is, as we might anticipate,
a fascination with Baker’s face and body. I would
suggest, however, that this response to her performances arose from their fixation with her black presence rather than her capacity to satisfy an appetite
for the exotic. Given that her early popularity can be
characterised as a transatlantic and decidedly modern/primitivist phenomenon, the critics’ endorsement of the phenomenon attests to the discourse in
which they understood her performance and her
blackness. If the Stockholm reception of Josephine
Baker did not depart significantly from other European responses to her stage and screen persona,
Stockholmers in the 1920s and 1930s certainly had
their own ‘take’ on her.
Notes
1.
2.
Lars Wikström, ‘Fredrik Adolf Ludvig Gustaf Albrecht
Badin-Couschi. Ett sällsamt levnadsöde’, in Släkt
och Hävd. Genealogiska studier tillägnade Börje Furtenback den 28 april 1971. Tidskrift utgiven av Genealogiska föreningen, riksförening för släktforskning, 1
(1971): 272–273.
Svenskt Biografiskt Lexikon, entry for Badin (Stockholm: Albert Bonnier, 1920), 544–545.
3.
Edvard Matz, ‘Ett experiment i fri uppfostran’, in
Magnus Bergsten (ed.), Idéer och äventyr. En antologi om svenskt 1700-tal (Lund: Historiska Media,
1999), 110.
4.
Ibid., 112–113.
5.
Främlingen – Dröm eller hot, exhibition catalogue
(Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 1996). See painting
of John Panzio Toxon by Augusta Åkerlöf, 116; and
To Stockholm, with Love: The Critical Reception of Josephine Baker, 1927–35
Neger med papegojor ock markattor, David Klöcker
Ehrenstrahl, 136. See also a pastel of Badin by Gustaf
Lundberg reproduced in Wikström, ‘Fredrik Adolf
Ludvig Gustaf Albrecht Badin-Couschi’, 292.
16.
‘Bakers första Film’, Nya Dagligt Allehanda, 4 December 1927.
17.
Nya Dagligt Allehanda, 3 December 1927.
18.
‘Imperial: Fresterskan från Tropikerna’, Svenska
Dagbladet, 4 December 1927, ‘Lördagspremiär på
Imperial’, Social-Demokraten, 4 December 1927. The
reviewer ‘M’ in Social-Demokraten adds that the
‘half-caste’s’ love interest is inevitably depicted as
unhappy.
19.
The inner city cinemas were Metropolhörnan, Imperial (the cinema in which the film was premiered) and
Påfågeln. Svenska Dagbladet, 17 July 1928.
20.
‘Baker-Scandal in Budapest’, newspaper clip, 4 April
1928, Musikmuseet; ‘Copenhagen’, Dagens Nyheter, 20 June 1928.
Charlene Regester, ‘The Construction of an Image
and the Deconstruction of a Star – Josephine Baker
Racialised, Sexualised, and Politicized in the AfricanAmerican Press, the Mainstream Press, and FBI
Files’, in Popular Music and Society (Spring 2000), 1
http//:www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2822/i
s_1_24/ai_73712454/print
21.
Social-Demokraten, 18 July 1928. Arbetaren, 18 July
1928, also published an ode to ‘The Black Jazz
Queen’ written by ‘Pillman’.
22.
Daniel Fallström, 20 July 1928, anon. newspaper clip
from the Music Museum, Stockholm.
23.
Ibid. This view was also shared by ‘K.F-m’ in Arbetaren, 20 July 1928.
10.
Ylva Habel, Modern Media, Modern Audiences: Mass
Media and Social Engineering in the 1930s Swedish
Welfare State (Stockholm: Aura förlag, 2002), 9.
24.
‘Svarte Rudolph’, ‘Josephine Bakers sommarseans’,
Social-Demokraten, 20 July 1928.
11.
Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London and New York: I.B. Tauris,
2002); Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined
Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Shelley
Stamp, Moviestruck Girls: Women and Motion Picture
Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000); Lauren Rabinovitz, For the
Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in
Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Jan Olsson, ‘Pressing
Inroads: Metaspectators and the Nickeoldeon Culture’, in John Fullerton (ed.), Screen Culture: History
and Textuality (Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing,
2004), 113–135.
25.
‘Åb’, ‘Josephine på Oscarsteatern’, Dagens Nyheter,
20 July 1928.
26.
‘Ted’, ‘Josephine Baker gjorde succès i bara bananer!’, Stockholms Dagblad, 20 July 1928.
27.
Social-Demokraten, 20 July 1928.
28.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112.
29.
Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her
Time (New York: Doubleday Publishing Group,
1989), 4, 15. Rose claims that the goofy ‘nigger grin’
became Baker´s signature, a stereotype with a
vengeance, and a way of looking back at objectifying
gazes (while at the same time fencing them off).
30.
Ibid.
31.
For a discussion on this doubleness, see ArcherStraw, Negrophilia, 94–116; on the aesthetics of the
Parisian primitivist avant-garde, see 117–130.
32.
See, for example, Archer-Straw, Negrophilia, 94–96,
106, 115–116, 118, 123, 126–127, 129; Rose, Jazz
Cleopatra, 114–119, Lynn Haney, Naked at the Feast:
The Biography of Josephine Baker (London: Robson
Books, 2002 [1995]), 63–73, 86, 100f, 117, 123, 146,
150, 163, 166, 175.
33.
Rose, Jazz Cleopatra, 266. Rose claims that Baker
also adapted the tableaux aesthetics of the wax
museum in her stage shows.
34.
Josephine Baker and Marcel Sauvage, Les mémoirs
de Josephine Baker. Receuillis et adaptés par Marcel
Sauvage. Avec 30 dessins inédits de Paul Colin
(Paris: KRA Éditeur, 1927).
6.
Wikström, ‘Fredrik Adolf Ludvig Albrecht’, 280.
7.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask (New York:
Grove Press, 1967 [1957]), 112.
8.
See, for instance, Oscar Björck’s Akademistude
(1878), a painting of the man nicknamed ‘The Negro
Pettersson’, (aka Pierre-Louis or Jean-Louis Pettersson) in Främlingen – Dröm eller hot, 114. Pettersson
was hired by Konstakademien (Royal Academy of
Art) as a model, and probably also posed for photographic studies. He was also painted by Karin
Bergsöö Larsson. Ibid., 114.
9.
12.
13.
Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris
and Black Culture in the 1920s (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2000).
‘Josephine Baker, “Fresterskan från Tropikerna”
kommer i sin första film i dag!’, Nya Dagligt Allehanda,
3 December 1927; ‘Josephine Baker-feber i stan’,
Dagens Nyheter, 5 December 1927. On New Year’s
Eve 1927, the film was the main attraction in the New
Year’s Eve programme at the Orion Theatre, SocialDemokraten, 31 December 1927.
14.
Tor Burn, ‘Imperial –Premiär’, Stockholms Dagblad,
4 December 1927. Unless otherwise indicated, all
translations from Swedish are by the author.
15.
Ibid.
137
138
Ylva Habel
35.
Haney, Naked at the Feast, 121.
36.
‘Josephine Baker i NK i dag!’, Svenska Dagbladet,
19 July 1928. The doll featured in the engagement
portrait of Baker and Abiato, see Archer-Straw, Negrophilia, 96.
37.
Sandells reklamarkiv/Sandell’s commercial short archives, part 1, Tevearkivet, Stockholm.
38.
For a discussion of the sexualisation of Baker’s body,
see Regester, ‘The Construction of am Image and
the Deconstruction of a Star’, net pages 6–10, 15–17.
39.
Archer-Straw, Negrophilia, 18, 109.
40.
Levinson cited in Ibid., 118. For a discussion of the
fetishisation of Baker as a universal ethnic spectacle,
see Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race,
Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC
and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 199–203.
50.
‘Afrika gör Succés på China’, Stockholms Dagblad,
16 July 1932.
51.
‘Primadonnan Joséphine’, Scenen 14 (1932): 400,
Arbetaren, 16 July 1932.
52.
‘Åberg’, Dagens Nyheter, 16 July 1932.
53.
‘Josephine-succé på China’, Svenska Dagbladet, 16
July 1932.
54.
‘H.S.’, ‘Joséphines romantiska karriär’ Scenen 14
(1932), 388.
55.
Ibid.
56.
Arthur Johnson, ‘Svartkonst. Revyprat med Arthur
Johnson’, Filmjournalen 32 (1932): 23.
57.
Ibid., 28, 30.
58.
Ibid., 30.
59.
For discussion of the European and American reception of Baker’s singing talent, see Regester, ‘The
Construction of an Image and the Deconstruction of
a Star’, net pages 2–3.
60.
Ibid., 13. See also Kathryn Kalinak, ‘Disciplining
Josephine Baker: Gender, Race and the Limits of
Disciplinarity’, in James Buhler, Caryl Flynn, David
Neumeyer (eds.), Music and Cinema (Hannover and
London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 316–335.
61.
Regester, ‘The Construction of an Image and the
Deconstruction of a Star’, net pages 16–18.
62.
‘Är Josephine en kulturfara? Vad stockholmarna
säga’, Stockholms Dagblad, 22 July 1928.
Rony, The Third Eye, 199. See also Ella Shohat and
Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 138.
63.
‘Eveo’, Svenska Dagbladet, 13 January 1935.
43.
Stockholms Dagblad, 23 July 1928.
64.
Vecko-Journalen 4 (1935).
44.
Ibid.
65.
Social-Demokraten, 13 January 1935.
45.
Ibid.
66.
46.
‘Arg notarie’, ibid.
‘Jerome’, ‘Josephine Baker’, Dagens Nyheter, 13
January 1935.
47.
‘Den krasskonservativa svenska småborgaren är ute
och spökar’, Stockholms Dagblad, 24 July 1928.
67.
Ibid.
68.
48.
Habel, Modern Media, Modern Audiences, 115–117.
‘Filmson’, ‘“Zou-Zou” på Riviera’, Aftonbladet, 13
January 1935.
69.
49.
‘Vad och vem är den bruna Josephine? Sensationernas diva – en impressarioprodukt – ett börspapper
– kvinnan i Europa!’, Scenen, 13–14 (1928): 408.
See Yuri Tsivian’s discussion of Maxim Gorky’s visit
to the ‘Kingdom of Shadows’ in Yuri Tsivian, Early
Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception (London
and New York: Routledge, 1994), 5–7.
41.
42.
Viktor Rydberg, ‘Om nakenhet och klädselsätt (med
anledning av striden om Oscar Björcks frismålningar
i Operakällaren, 1895)’, in Viktor Rydberg. Samlade
skrifter. Singoalla, uppsatser, barndomsminnen, tal,
m.m. (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1943), 261–284. Olof
[Karsten] Schmeling, Mot baddräktskulturen (Valdemarsvik: O. Schmelings Accidens-Tryckeri, 1928).
Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley,
Los Angeles, London: University of California Press,
1998). For American views on Baker’s nudity, see
Regester, ‘The Construction of am Image and the
Deconstruction of a Star’, net pages 6–8.