The Demimondaine as Transmedia Celebrity: Remembering La Belle Otero

This paper explores the style and circulation of Otèro’s transmedia celebrity. It asks how her status as a global demimondaine influenced the dress, dance and role she brought to the nascent cinema. More significantly, it explores the way that Otèro wrote about her early career in her autobiography Les Souvenirs et la vie intime de La Belle Otero (Paris, 1926). Comparing this autobiography to the later biopic made about her, La Belle Otero (Richard Pottier,1954) I ask: How is the global fame of a courtesan and dancer understood in film? How is celebrity imagined retroactively, from the vantage point of the cinema? It is my contention that celebrities such as Otèro were hugely important to the style and function of the early cinema but that their lives and careers have been overlooked and elided in the effort to make transmedia celebrity a product of the cinema industry.