Factual or “based-on-fact” fiction, music biographies tend towards forgettable mundane. Interrupted by applause during and after, Annette von Wangenheim’s Josephine Baker: Black Diva in a White Man’s World is one inspiring exception, though at forty-five minutes it will have difficulty picking up a distributor. Shown but once in the Theatre of the Riverside Church, one of six festival venues, the English and subtitled-French and –German documentary figures among the usual eclectic, often imported rewards of the 15th Annual African Diaspora Film Festival, which fortuitously coincides with a separate downtown retrospective of Senegalese Father of black African cinema, Ousmane Sembène.

Less recognized here than should be, during her lifetime and since, like many African-American artists before and after the Second World War St. Louis-born Baker emigrated to Europe despite ranking as New York Vaudeville’s highest-paid chorus girl at $125 per week. That rare success from a first, 1925 appearance in La Revue Négre at the Théatre des Champs-Élysées, she became the darling of Paris and its Lost Generation famous and rich, her frenetic near-nude banana-girdled Danse sauvage movements represented here in old clips.

The most frequent of the interviewees, Baker biographer Phyllis Rose (Jazz Cleopatra, 1989) points out that “the French were quick to equate energy with the primitive [and] colonialist sexual fantasy,” envisioning her, not as American but African, and that the famous bananas were, in fact, “a phallic symbol.” Such Old World racial condescension is not made anything of, nor is there conscious irony indicated in l’Élysées’ seizure for back taxes of the Dordogne château where she was raising a heterogeneous “Rainbow Tribe” dozen internationally adopted orphans, this after awarding her the nation’s highest civilian honors for entertaining troops--“So many unshaved chins! Can I kiss them all?”-- and likely serving as a spy during the Occupation.

Nevertheless, “for many years,” Baker’s voice tells us, “I wasn’t proud to be an American, wasn’t allowed to be the American I wanted to be,” and she was naturalized as a Frenchwoman in 1937. Her few European films found acceptance only over there and often exploited Rose’s “primitive” energy and sexuality. Speaking today, Brian Bouillon-Baker takes note of his mother’s succès de scandale and that, “a mother and political being, she wasn’t proud [to remember herself] as a dancer half-naked onstage to excite an audience.”

Commenting on colorized clips from Plantation, others like Elsa Wolliaston and Arthur Mitchell are of the opinion that, on the contrary, she was caricaturizing herself, saying “love me” at a time when blacks were consigned to rôles as servants, mammies or tap-dancing foils to curly-haired white girls. Although most of the commentators come from the world of dance (including wife-and-husband Carmen De Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder, themselves subjects of ADFF’s Carmen & Geoffrey), La Baker transformed herself and, through lessons, her voice. As a ‘30s-‘40s chanteuse, she set patterns of style and costume that would subsequently be recognizable in Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli and, most openly, Shirley Bassey.

The performer Baker is well served for such a truncated study, but the offstage life is also brought out with equal skill. Though only one of possibly six husbands is mentioned, sympathetic “bandleader of substance” Bouillon who finally could not bankroll the children on top of her financial mismanagement, the loving mother is apparent --“It’s a shame I couldn’t adopt thousands”-- alongside the civil rights activist she was to become in her birthplace. Not embraced by America’s white population, who Rose insists “wanted head scarves and grotesque makeup,” she integrated theaters here (unmentioned is a 1973 standing ovation at Carnegie Hall), packed the Roxy, triumphed at Harlem’s 1951 Baker Day Parade and, in Free French lieutenant’s uniform and Légion d’Honneur, was the only woman speaker at the 1963 March on Washington. Dr. King’s “dedication to human dignity” thank-you letter is shown and read from, but curiously absent is Coretta Scott King’s later suggestion that Baker assume her assassinated husband’s mantle.

Previous treatments have come from Europe, except for the 1991 HBO cable The Josephine Baker Story, out on a DVD rated “R” for nudity. Rags-to-riches-to-rags bioflicks invariably are treacly downers, but the only depressing aspect last night was that Jean-Claude Baker, one of two sons who co-own Forty-second Street’s Chez Josephine, was feeling under the weather from chemotherapy and had to cancel his promised appearance. “Unique, from her standpoint, the black Josephine Baker in France and the U.S.,” Von Wangenheim’s portrait is, responded the audience, “a victory, she died with such grace, and I feel better about her now.”

At the end is her last performance, brought about by Prince Rainier and Princess Grace. Gracious and stunning in a bodysuit at sixty-eight, she delights a star-packed Paris Bobino crowd celebrating her half-century retrospective. Found in a coma next morning, she died peacefully within forty-eight hours. “The most poetic death of all,” concludes Holder of the generous woman who furthered his and his wife’s careers: “goes to a party, having read all her congratulatory letters, to go to sleep and not wake up. That is an angel.”

(Not rated by MPAA.)