Re-Rewind
Found Footage Festival Commemorates Rediscovered Classics
Creating a canon of VHS excellence for rediscovered classics like, Enjoying Lovemaking Through Hypnosis, Ventriloquism For Fun & Profit or Rent-a-Friend, the Found Footage Festival—screening in Montreal Feb.
1—celebrates a golden age of home video.
“In the mid 80s and 90s, every home had a VCR and it was a fairly new thing. All of a sudden, any idiot with a few bucks could produce their own video, and it took off,” said Nick Prueher, the co-curator of the FFF, from his Brooklyn home.
“Anytime a format reaches that kind of ubiquity, you get a lot of weird, esoteric stuff that ends up on it.”
In a world where any shmuck with a smart phone can upload daily hilarity to the Internet, these tapes are certainly not your average YouTube videos. Prueher, with his partner Joe Pickett, have been amassing a sizable compilation of weird, lo-fi footage since 1991, finding gems in thrift stores, garbage and garage sales.
Rich in cultural capital, the pair has over 5,000 tapes in their collection and are continually amazed by the glut of strange stuff they continue to find and take on tour with them.
“You get discouraged and then find something like Rent-a-Friend and it’s like ‘Oh yeah, that’s why we’re doing this,’” Prueher chuckled. The video, as desperate and pathetic as it sounds, is apparently for lonely people in need of an hourly friend. “So you pop in a tape and this guy keeps you company. He asks you questions and he tells you about himself and you’re supposed to answer to your TV. It’s just all very sad.”
Taking the festival from their living room to venues around the world since 2004, the FFF is made up of surprising, similar anomalies like these, hosted with curated context and comedy, as both FFF founders formerly worked for The Onion and The Late Show with David Letterman.
“The footage is uncomfortably familiar to people, whether it’s a training video you had to watch at your crummy first job or an exercise video your mom used to watch after school. Whatever it is, people know this era and have a fondness for it,” Prueher said.
On top of scouring old camcorders or discovering discards in the dump, ordinary folks also volunteer their videos at shows, adding to the “communal aspect” of the show.
“People don’t want to watch something alone, on a two-inch screen in their inbox and forget about it 30 seconds later,” said Prueher. “Everything’s a lot funnier in a group.”
Mentioning he just received footage from California—a transit bus video, entitled Operation Blue Line, starring people costumed as The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—he said getting a new video in the mail is “like Christmas morning: we can’t wait to tear it open, put it in and see what happens.”
Prueher said the duo is never surprised about how weird things can get on discarded VHS, but are continually surprised by the stuff deemed worthy to commit to videotape.
“For us [these tapes are] worth preserving, not only because it makes you laugh, but because there are organizations like the Smithsonian and the American film institute that preserve Citizen Kane […] but there are no temperature controlled vaults for someone’s home movie,” he explained. “For me, those videos say a lot more about us as a culture than do some of the great films of the last century. They are in many ways, warts and all, more truthful. You’re getting an unvarnished look at what happened.”
The Found Footage Festival comes to Théâtre Ste. Catherine (264 St. Catherine E.) on Feb. 1. Tickets are $10 and you are invited to bring your old tapes! The duo will also be screening the bootlegged, 1986 classic Heavy Metal Parking Lot at the show. For more information, check out foundfootagefest.com
This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 20, published January 25, 2011.
