Her first film, *Siren of the Tropics* (1927), was a French silent production in which she played a character named Papitou, a young woman on a Caribbean island who falls in love with a French engineer and eventually follows him to Paris. It was not a subtle film; the narrative rested on the same primitivist assumptions that shaped her stage persona, and the character she played was coded throughout as natural, simple, and unburdened by the complications of civilization. By some accounts it was the first feature film in which a Black woman played the lead role, though the distinction of “first” in categories involving race and film history is typically contested and contextually dependent.
She followed it with *Zou-Zou* (1934), a French musical in which she played a Creole laundry worker who becomes a stage star. The narrative — a person of humble origins achieving artistic success through natural talent and romantic misfortune — allowed for a more complex portrayal than her earlier film work, and her performance drew positive reviews that acknowledged her as an actress rather than simply as a visual spectacle. The film’s specific achievement was to give Baker a role that was emotional in ways her stage persona was not typically allowed to be: she cried on screen, she suffered, she demonstrated a range of feeling that the “exotic dancer” framing had consistently suppressed.
*Princesse Tam-Tam* (1935) returned to more familiar territory: a story in which a North African street woman is transformed by a French aristocrat into a sophisticated socialite, only to revert to her “natural” character when provoked by the sound of African drums. The colonial ideology embedded in this narrative — the idea that civilization is a veneer over the natural primitive state of the African — is obvious from a contemporary vantage point. Baker played the role, and played it with professional craft, within a framework that she had no power to change.