...assistant director Bunel. The silent film tells the story of an innocent girl from the tropics who does the Charleston and eventually brings the dance to Paris. Based upon an idea suggested by her manager and lover Giuseppe "Pepito" Abatino, who also costarred, the production was considered by most critics nothing more than a curiosity even upon its release. (1) Many involved with the film, such as Bunel, characterized the finished product as a joke exemplified by tasteless moments featuring the star falling into a flour bin, thus becoming "white," and later suggestively bathing herself to restore her color. Baker found the entire experience humiliating, stating that the "'film brought tears to my eyes. Was that ugly, silly person me?'" (Rose 120). When she once again ventured before the cameras in the 1930s, Baker and Abatino made certain that her first sound production reflected a star persona that the famous dancer could comfortably embrace. Of all her motion picture appearances, Marc Allegret's Zouzou (1934) became Baker's personal favorite. During its production, she said, "'The film enchants me.... Everything seems easy, because I feel the story so very strongly. It all seems so real, so true, that I sometimes think it's my own life being played out on the sets'" (Wood 182).

Such sentiments seem more than just groundless publicity since the film contains a plot purposely reflecting Baker's personality and life story. Zouzou (Baker), a Creole laundress, grows up in the circus along with her foster brother Jean (Jean Cabin). She yearns for stardom onstage and longs for the love of Jean, whom she eventually saves from a false murder charge. Despite her inevitable rise to stardom as a revue singer, Zouzou is left heartbroken as Jean falls in love with her white best friend Claire (Germaine Aussey). The story, based on an idea by Abatino, was tailored for Baker's talents and stage persona. Oddly enough, much of this storyline's construction with its "rags-to-riches" dynamic heavily resembles American musicals, especially the backstage musicals popular at Warner Bros. during the period. Baker's love of the production as a reflection of herself, something definitely not the case with La Sirene, exemplifies Zouzou's position as a star vehicle of a distinctive sort. Typical of many French motion pictures of the early 1930s, the film basically was independently produced, with Arys Nissotti, a Tunisian casino owner, funding the majority of the production. Most likely, Abatino and his client also invested in the film--which, along with its follow-up Princess Tam Tam (1935), showcases specifically how they wished Baker to be seen onscreen. The production intends to redefine how the famous dancer and singer would transition into motion pictures, thus specifying her persona for future star vehicles by correcting the mistakes of La Sirene.

Recent critical responses to Zouzou often focus on the text as an illustration of complex colonial, social, and communal issues prevalent within Paris during the early 1930s. Elizabeth Ezra sees the film as a reflection of a Parisian society in flux between traditional and new communities. By questioning French national identity through multiple presentations of exhibition and theater, the venues depicted in the film establish how "traditional structures of community were being threatened by both the right and left; between the right-wing leagues and the Popular Front." She ties this concept to how cinema was rapidly refashioning "new representations of community as well as new communities of spectators" that ultimately "played into the debate of national identity, eliciting some hostile reactions that fed into a more general nostalgia for a community perceived to be on the wane. This nostalgia is at the heart of Zouzou" (Colonial 102). (2) Dina Sherzer's reading also considers the film as primarily an exploration of the boundaries of national identity. She views the motion picture as a rather conservative plea for nationalism--primarily a colonialist commentary against miscegenation, something appearing in the rejection of Zouzou as love interest and the pairing of Jean and Claire as a racially "pure" and "'natural' match" (233). Kelley Conway, with her examination of the film in a book-length study of French revue stars, sees it as a showcase for Baker as a distinctly French "grande dame du musichall" (139). While French national identity certainly plays a part in Zouzou, what many of these responses overlook are the complexities involved when examining the text as a transnationally-influenced star vehicle. The sometimes contradictory American and French influences at play within the film must drastically redetermine how we approach its complicated views of race and miscegenation.

Zouzou proves fascinating not only by illustrating the ethnic and social boundaries of 1930s Paris, but by forcing us to reconsider of the star vehicle as a filmic construct. The production's expressed reason for being is to showcase Baker, thereby it exists primarily as a version of, to use the phrasing of Patrick McGilligan, "actor as auteur." (3) Despite significantly being an Allegret production, the intention behind the film remains to showcase Baker above story, locale, and, to a lesser extent, even the musical sequences where the star fails to appear. Yet this distinction does not simply designate the text as a theatrical type of showcase cinema, though it does bare some resemblances to other early sound productions heavily influenced by variety and music stage shows. Instead, by examining 1930s French attitudes toward race within an often American-influenced musical style, the film poses a problematic question. How do we reconcile popular conceptions of "star"--often heavily motivated by the films produced through the American star system--within a text distinctly French in its presentations of race and nationality? To consider this problem, the significant casting choice of Baker's male costar must also be examined as contributing to this confrontation between the racial and the national. Zouzou casts French leading man Jean Gabin opposite of Baker in the key role of Jean, the object of the lead character's romantic preoccupation. Gabin remained just one year away from making La Bandera (1935), which progressed him toward exemplifying the role of "flawed populist hero" in the French cinema of the 1930s. Despite preceding some of the actor's more famous appearances in such films as Pepe Le Moko (1937) and La Grande illusion (1937), his presence in Zouzou still acknowledges a persona of a French "every-man" by casting him within a workingman role projecting "charming ordinariness" that serves to counter his costar's appealing otherness.

By showcasing Baker and, to a lesser extent, Gabin within a musical heavily resembling American productions, the film exists as a transnationally-influenced star vehicle that bases its construction in racially distinctive boundaries. These social perimeters also determine how the text reconfigures the star vehicle as a construct through transcending the popular definitions based in American systems. In what follows, I will examine how this reconfiguration emerges in the shifting stylistics of the production between Americanized musical and a poetic realist French style of filmmaking. These fluctuations provide a complex web of Hollywood, French revue, and realist performances showcased in both musical and dramatic styles. Emerging from a distinctly French gaze upon the racial Other, Zouzou provides a surprisingly empathetic, yet ultimately problematic, attempt at reconciling a possible miscegenation within its star paring. As a result, while the film presents the "actor as auteur," it shows how such a production changes its dynamics through an overwhelming transnational and racial influence found within the personas of the stars themselves.

ACCESSING THE FRENCH MOVIE STAR BEYOND AMERICAN DEFINITIONS

Before examining a text like Zouzou as a musical star vehicle, we must recognize that the theoretical discourse of the star defines itself heavily in American performers. This distinction especially appears in the early serious critical work on movie stars. Edgar Morin's 1960 book The Stars discusses these figures in various social roles as living and dead icons, economic products, and objects of lust. Like other French critics of the period, Morin particularly idolizes the American star system and does not make much distinction between the seductive powers of James Dean, Charlie Chaplin, or Marilyn Monroe in comparison to Jean Gabin or Brigitte Bardot. Proceeding generations also theorized the star primarily as an American construct. Richard Dyer's Stars bases the majority of its examples in American film, closely analyzing multiple popular figures as social phenomena, cinematic images, and signs. James Naremore's Acting in the Cinema gives close readings of seven specific star performances in individual films, all American productions. Such a theoretical slant toward one country would normally seem biased when considering most other aspects of the cinematic text. But this particular distinction has significant historical merit since the early construction of the star system exists primarily as an...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Post Script
"Mum's the word": the trial of genre in Dancer in the Dark.(Critical e..., September 22, 2006
"You came back!"; or, Mulholland Treib.(Critical essay), September 22, 2006
Jans B. Wager. Dames in the Driver's Seat: Rereading Film Noir.(Book r..., September 22, 2006
Annual Bibliography of film studies--2005.(from Post Script), September 22, 2006

Looking for additional articles?
Search our database of over 3 million articles.

Looking for more in-depth information on this industry?
Search our complete database of Industry & Market reports by text, subject, publication name or publication date.

About Goliath
Whether you're looking for sales prospects, competitive information, company analysis or best practices in managing your organization, Goliath can help you meet your business needs.

Our extensive business information databases empower business professionals with both the breadth and depth of credible, authoritative information they need to support their business goals. Whether it be strategic planning, sales prospecting, company research or defining management best practices - Goliath is your leading source for accurate information.