Madame
Qiu Jiongjiong
邱炯炯
Production date
2009-2010
Object Detail
Media
video (black and white, sound)
Measurements
122 min 10 sec
Notes
Filmed in black and white, the 120-minute documentary juxtaposes the gentle character of Fan Qihui, tailor and designer, with the performances of his alter-ago, drag performer Madame Bilan de Linphel. In tightly-framed close-ups, Fan talks reflectively in unedited monologues about his childhood, and his experience of being different to others; he explains his difficult relationship with his parents, and discusses love and sex in Beijing’s gay subculture. In the persona of Madame, with a cigarette held languidly in one hand and microphone in the other, a flower pinned in her enormous curly black wig reminding us of Billie Holiday – another tragic performer – she looks out at her audience from downcast, heavily kohled eyes and says in her deep voice, ‘You can call me Ms Mysterious.’ With a slightly out of tune honky-tonk piano as accompaniment, she sings the torch songs of 1940s divas such as Bai Guang. Tears mixed with heavy mascara slide down her face. These melancholy songs of love, loss, and inevitable betrayal alternate with stories of Fan’s life, told in a gravelly Beijing accent, and with outrageously explicit details. wriggling of a male body into the extravagant feminine accoutrements of the nightclub singer. Qiu Jiongjiong was fascinated by the contradictions in this life, the creation of an illusion for an audience, repeated night after night.
Interviewed for a film screening in Beijing Qiu Jiongjiong said, ‘…the more I looked, the more the contradictions coalesced…the desolation, the beauty, the wretchedness…’ Like a modern-day Toulouse-Lautrec watching women in Parisian brothels, including the unglamorous, unobserved moments, Qiu sees the metamorphosis of an apparently ordinary man into a cabaret star.
Interviewed for a film screening in Beijing Qiu Jiongjiong said, ‘…the more I looked, the more the contradictions coalesced…the desolation, the beauty, the wretchedness…’ Like a modern-day Toulouse-Lautrec watching women in Parisian brothels, including the unglamorous, unobserved moments, Qiu sees the metamorphosis of an apparently ordinary man into a cabaret star.
Accession number
2011.068