Carmen Jones (1955, Otto Preminger)
Carmen Jones, both the film and the transplanted archetype for whom it is named, comes on with quite a salvo: If you love me, that’s the end of you. The character of Carmen was introduced in a French novella in the year 1845 and made properly epochal in Georges Bizet’s opera about three decades later. Otto Preminger’s 1955 film, in CinemaScope and DeLuxe Color, is based on a 1943 Broadway revue by Oscar Hammerstein II in which Bizet’s “tunes” were adapted specifically for an African American cast. Part of Preminger’s directorial brand always involved the cursory pushing of the envelope, and he took things further here, insisting upon Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte as his leads, both of whom he knew exclusively as nightclub singers. Dandridge’s Carmen is avowedly Carmen with a difference. For Bizet, she is the quintessential “gypsy”, but in the exclusively black Deep South of this fantastical Second World War-set Hollywood musical, she carries traces of “hoodoo,” a creole paganism that may or may not hint to the viewer at something resembling a revolutionary wellspring.
In an essay largely focused on the American novelist Herman Melville, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze writes the following:
Kafka said that in a minor literature, that is, in the literature of a minority, there is no private history that is not immediately public, political, and popular, all literature becomes an ‘affair of the people,’ and not of exceptional individuals. Is not American literature the minor literature par excellence, insofar as America claims to federate the most diverse minorities, ‘a Nation swarming with nations’? America brings together extracts, it presents samples from all ages, all lands, and all nations.
What is perhaps first most distinctive with respect to Preminger’s Carmen Jones is the manner in which it places its archetypal heroes, Joe and Carmen, within a tightly-wound network of associations and shifting alliances that in itself becomes the primary narrative agent. This is not only a film featuring two black leads, but a projected American world or reimagined recent past populated by Black bodies exclusively, bodies out in the open, openly active and interactive. It is an arrogant and affluent boxer named Husky Miller who lures Carmen and her barfly friends to Chicago like Cinderella and her stepsisters.
The power politics are standard operating procedure, more or less, but this narrative unmistakably persists in prizing foremost the “public, political, and popular” nature of the spectacle at hand while overriding the exclusive right of “exceptional individuals” upon which it would normally depend.
Though this will become a thread that weaves through popular forms of Black cinematic counterculture—a prime example might be the community choir that joins the hero in his flight into the extra-urban wastes during the final act of Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971)—the hierarchy of the dominant, which is very much to say the on-the-ground living reality of structural inequality and systemic racism, informs the production of Preminger’s film itself, no matter how legitimately radical the kernel of its immediate inspiration. Nowhere is this more lamentably foregrounded than in the “front office” decision to post-dub, employing white opera singers (!), the vast majority of the musical numbers (the memorable “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum” being a notable exception).
Preminger was a control freak and probably most people’s idea of a tyrant. He is also at the same time the sort of person who might be especially likely to personally identify with Carmen’s openness to an interdependence close to announcing itself outright as practical anarchy. Part of how Preminger prizes his cast is by providing them handsome blocks of time in which to carry out the niceties of their craft, but in Carmen Jones a tendency toward takes of long duration has the secondary effect of bringing the hyperreal background to the mind’s foreground, locating this “public, political, and popular” experience within impossible visual syntheses that may suddenly start to resemble mass-hypnosis. The actual politics are for the most part actively invisible, whatever new visibilities happen to in this case be afforded.
-Written by Jason Wierzba