Episodic film with Felix Burger, Alfred Hitchcock, Kim Novak, Buster Keaton and Franz Liszt. Filmed in München, Paris and Schliersee, 2010

Impossible to get ahold of Felix Burger– even though he is the center of attraction.

"It had always been my desire to film the story of my life.", commences his autobiographical epic. "Too remarkable seemed my exuberant work, to important my artistic existence, for humanity to be deprived of it." From the very beginning there is no question that anybody but he could assume the main role in this existential piece. Therefore, Felix Burger plays Felix Burger, a manic, egomaniac character, a fugitive, who on his way through his own life traverses, as it were, the époques of cinematic history; in so doing, he appears to overcome time and space effortlessly. He is an eccentric in the true sense, one who remains on the fringes because he has made himself the center of his universe and everyone else satellites.

Only with difficulty does he bring himself to accept help. Alfred Hitchcock is consulted in giving the script its final polish; he dictates the seductive Kim Novak as his female counterpart into the script; and Buster Keaton, who is hired as the comic relief, is to provide a sanguine note to offset the pathos with which Burger envelops himself. Yet his delusions of grandeur tolerate no other gods beside himself, so the efforts of the outer world end disastrously: the intimate relation to Kim Novak, hardly begun, hardly even implied, in an attack of acute sexual phobia, the collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock in a bitter quarrel and Buster Keaton’s engagement with the accidental tragi-comic death of the mime.

As Burger fails to achieve salvation in his grandiose-intended, disastrously shattered film, he hopes to gain saving grace with music. He calls upon the aged Franz Liszt in his Parisian apartment who manages to elevate the thwarted script to a work of art by translating it into his own language, i.e., as if it were a score: into tones, sounds and harmonies. His piano playing cures Burger’s botched life, smoothes all of the biographical upheavals, mitigates, understands. Felix Burger has reached his goal. His flight from life ends in the arms of Liszt, his escape from film winds up in music, but of course this will only work – as a film. For just at the moment when the conciliatory final sequence threatens to deteriorate into sentimentality, the camera pulls back out of the scene and exposes this last dramatic turn as a feint of fiction in a tilted shot of the set and dream equipment. One cannot go beyond the limits of the medium. It can only be cleverly, perfidiously shifted as Felix Burger does, who gets out of the act by expounding on his own failure, thus preserving his narration from complete collapse.

One could almost forget that the protagonist controlling all these manoeuvres is becoming almost invisible. The unsuccessful attempt to reveal his biography to the public turns him into a phantom that withdraws into the self-centered loop of his story. Thus the film as an enclosed system revolves around Felix Burger, like around an empty hub. And it leads to hermetic places that imprison their inhabitants in similar, gyrating movements: Felix Burger with Kim Novak in the muggy pastel atmosphere of a hotel room in which every glance is cast like a billard ball from mirror to mirror; with Buster Keaton in a rocking row boat that keeps turning in the lake without direction; with Franz Liszt in the composer’s stuffy music salon, draped with rugs, dancing in a tight embrace to the slow melody of Liszt’s Love’s Dream.

As if in passing, the film undergoes a perpetual esthetical metamorphosis in this journey through time by adapting the atmosphere, stylistic impressions and contextual components of the great classics. The image of Kim Novak, floating out of the bathroom into the hotel room like a celestial apparition and approaching Felix Burger, waiting, invariably overlaps with the recollection of an identical scene from Hitchcock’s Vertigo down to the details of the room, lighting, cut and the music (except for the fact that Burger is not James Stewart – and brusquely rebuffs Kim Novak’s advances). Buster Keaton’s demise betwixt the settings put together amateurishly by Burger cites in jerky black-and-white Keaton’s most famous stunt sequence from Steamboat Bill Jr (whereby in this case) Keaton the dolt once again escapes alive out of the self-produced inferno with astonishing luck). The prologue touches upon Melanie Laurent’s transformation in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, later Burger rambles through Paris by night like Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard’s Breathless, and when he literally barges into Liszt’s house, it is as if he were plunging right into the middle of a brownish-pale Nadar photograph coming to life.

This chameleon-likeness is not only a nice cinematic touch but also an ingenious strategy to prevent the hero of the narration from being caught. For whoever scampers through history with such mercurial naturalness can be everywhere, all of the time, yet not ensnared simply because he is not bound to places and chronologies. His vagabond life and inscrutable androgyny cause Felix Burger to belong to those strange, undefined, unreal beings that populate his whole film. For isn’t the Hitchcock that Burger presents to us only a shadow play on the wall? Buster Keaton a lookalike charlatan? And Kim Novak a reincarnation out of the realm of the dead? And finally is Franz Liszt, who leans unbudgingly against his piano with a sallow face resembling a death mask, as if rigor mortis had already set in, really more than just a high-strung figment of fantasy? Uncertain terrain, wherever you look: false identities, dubious characters, weird picture puzzles. No one is totally present, no one is totally himself.

The game that Felix Burger sets in motion is a tricky experiment with reality and its different levels. Under each layer that is revealed lurks a new version of the world that presents itself as equally genuine and authentic. The reality that we would like to have as a guarantee for certainty and stability is, as Valerio in Büchner’s Leonce and Lena establishes, in the end "like an onion, nothing but peels, or like boxes tucked into each other. In the largest there is nothing but boxes and in the smallest there is nothing at all". And while we are rummaging in the packaging for the quintessence, Felix Burger has once again slipped away.

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