Do the offerings of the city’s semiofficial film fest look a trifle dull and mainstreamy? If that’s how you’re feeling these days, perhaps you’d enjoy a little movie called C’mon Babe (Danke Schoen), which combines footage of lemmings scurrying to their deaths with bits of song by Wayne Newton, Frank Sinatra, and Johnny Cash. “A kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent”–the rich, fruity tones of the nature-film narrator alternate with Newton’s lisp–“Danke schoen, darling, danke schoen.”–“They become victims of an obsession.”–“Thank you for all the joy and pain.”–“It is not given to man to understand.”–“Save those lies, darling, don’t explain.” The first verse of the song (which I’ve always thought one of the more perverse and mysterious pop hits of our time) is repeated again and again, evoking the image of its singer (Las Vegas icon, reputed mob connections) and intertwining it with grainy and off-color images of lemmings moving en masse, leaping off a cliff, hunted by birds, while other music, and that impossible narrator, also come and go on the sound track . . .
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C’mon, Babe (Danke Schoen), a short film by Chicagoan Sharon Sandusky, receives its local premiere this Saturday at Chicago Filmmakers, as part of a program entitled “Sex, Politics, Good Citizens & the Art of Fitting In.” The program also features the 50s camp classic Red Nightmare, Joyce Wieland’s metaphorical Rat Life and Diet In North America, and films by George and Bruce Conner, among others. It, in turn, is part of a larger project at Filmmakers, the Social Science Fiction Festival. The concept behind this four-weekend festival is a bit hard to explain, though it seems pretty coherent once you “get it.” The object, according to several of the people involved in putting the festival together, is to break through the bounds of “consensus reality.” Brenda Webb, executive director of Filmmakers, calls it “stream-of-consciousness programming.”
These reprinted musings, which range from the cranky to the surreal, have made the literary fame of William “Fergie” Ferguson (Fergie on fishes: “They are very, very careful that they do not make any mistakes. Of course, they make mistakes like anyone, but they try not to. . . . Different kinds of mistakes, too many to mention”) and Ernest Noyes Brookings, whose poetry has been collected in a book (We Did Not Plummet Into Space) and has been used as song lyrics by REM and others. The Duplex Nursing Home closed down last year, and Greenberger has moved to another town, but the magazine continues, its focus having widened to what the editor describes as fringe characters in general–“people who are on the fringe of your and my awareness; people you run into at the Salvation Army, street people . . .” Greenberger will read from the magazine and show excerpts from The Lighthearted Nation, a documentary about it. A screening of Otis Banton and His Spaceship the Jungle will follow.
