A Life in Chameleons

WINNER OF THE 2021 REFLEX PRESS NOVELLA AWARD

A Life in Chameleons recounts the queer and fascinating life of Leopoldo Fregoli, an Italian quick-change artist known as ‘The Chameleon’. Fregoli is born just before cinema first jerks into motion and lives in constant fast-forward. A Life in Chameleons stages Fregoli’s story as the moving image of a life.

Fregoli’s daring feats of drag entangle him with the Lumière brothers, the serpentine dancer Loïe Fuller, the duelling actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, his stage double (and lover) Romolo, and the mad futurist F.T. Marinetti. As Fregoli changes himself into them, the narrative splices new forms together; with every jump cut, he is a new actress. But the only women in the life of Fregoli, really, are the ones he becomes himself. When women like Fregoli’s wife, Velia, begin to ask their own questions about becoming, he can offer them nothing more than empty dresses and hapless jokes. Both a light waltz among the extravagant characters of early cinema and a queer feminist slant on life-writing, A Life in Chameleons is a sort of biography written in film strips.