Right now, he’s just about omnipresent: Friedrich Liechtenstein can be seen on 3sat on 123—istanbul, Playboy has articles about him, and he’s featured at every Berlin club worth its salt. Now, on April 13 this very special Renaissance man will introduce the premiere of his “New German Silent Movie”, as he calls the genre, entitled “The Dolphin Mann”. Cinema raconteurs and live music, actors, dancers, and naturally he, The Entertainer, Liechtenstein himself will on this occasion turn the Prater into a cutesy Club Cinema like those that mushroomed in the 1960s. This movie house has seats at tables, pretzel sticks and sophisticated, well-mannered drinks.
“The Dolphin Mann” is, on the one hand, a Show Programme to accompany a silent movie, and on the other hand the real time production of a silent movie. Every performance is actually a production! The film itself is in the tradition of Superman, Spiderman and The Elephant Man, but new and different. It deals with the late blooming of a literally queer fellow gingerly stepping along a path between Don-Juan-like exploits and homosexuality, working as a legionnaire in the Foreign Legion, as a petrol station manager and as a gogo dancer, and who finally dies in order to make room for his alter ego. It is also a film about the iconography of post-war modernity as well as, of course, a love story. The story starts in 1958 on the Expo in Brussels, and ends on Christmas 2009 on the show stage of an itinerant boccia alley. Photos, drawings, animations, maps, documentary material as well as staged scenes are assembled in the production. The film therefore belongs to the tradition of contemporary musical movies.
