This Saturday, the Visual Arts Center is hosting the 6th Volume of the Found Footage Festival, presented by the James River Film Society. Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett will be showing scores of, well, found footage, collected from thrift stores and donated collections all around the country.
This Saturday, the Visual Arts Center is hosting the 6th Volume of the Found Footage Festival, presented by the James River Film Society. Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett will be showing scores of, well, found footage, collected from thrift stores and donated collections all around the country. Their performance combines the joys of a Youtube viral video hunt, which we’ve all been on with our friends at one time or another, and stand-up comedy delivered by the most ardent and successful poachers of misguided cinema. If the idea of hunching over a laptop screen with a buddy or two mining the internet for funny videos is attractive, then being in a room with dozens of schadenfreude-loving finger pointers laughing at the unintentionally humiliating efforts of earnest video producers is downright hot.
Nick and Joe started casually collecting weird old VHS tapes back in 1991 when they found a godawful training video in a McDonalds break room. They knew this level of incompetence deserved an audience. After years of sharing their finds with their circle of friends in social scenarios, they decided to bring their collection to a local New York comedy club, which just happened to have a projector and screen setup. This was 2004, after the VHS format had died and nearly everyone was shipping off their troves of videos to the nearest Salvation Army. This glut of content has been raided by these guys in every stop along their frequent tours around the country. Nick had some interesting answers to some of my most pressing questions when I talked to him earlier today.
One of the hallmarks of your previous shows has been the nearly unbearable creepiness and non-self-aware quality of your typical FFF selection. They’re always funny in some intangible way but the alternately dead/wild-eyed delivery of the actors involved is like going to the human zoo.
This show is more creepy and more unsettling than ever, for whatever reason. This festival features old, re-discovered VHS tapes that are amazingly niave, yet disturbingly compelling. The filmmakers’ lack of self-awareness is pretty endearing most of the time, thought it can also get quite strange.
One of the common threads in the best of these videos is the obviously-great intentions these producers had while making the movies and clips. For instance, one of the entries in the show this time around is entitled “Handmade Love.” It’s an instructional video for masturbation for developmentally disabled adults. It’s heart is certainly in the right place, but the production value is snuff film-level bad. It looks like a terrorist film. The consistent lack of polish on most of these adds to a certain overall creepiness that really can’t be faked or reproduced.
What kind of stuff have you gotten that you couldn’t include? What’s too much?
Well, the masturbation video made the cut, so not much, really. We’ve toyed with this one video – you know, we’d trade videos back in the nineties and this one was truly remarkable. It was given to us by somebody in a band, but it was originally sent to the guitar player Steve Vai – just one of his female fans looking into a camera professing her love and willingness to do anything for Steve Vai. Well, this woman does what I can only describe as “stunts” – things
like blowing out candles with an orifices other than her mouth. We don’t shy from nudity in our shows, but this woman was clearly disturbed. Ultimately, that’s why we decided not to include it in the show. If it’s more disturbing than it is funny, it doesn’t make the cut. It’s a fine line.
Do you often receive submissions that aren’t nearly as funny as people think they are?
There’s this video series people donate a lot: Donut Man. It’s a Christian children’s show starring the Donut Man – puppets, costumes, etc. It has all the elements and it should work, but it’s just boring. It’s something we see a lot, and Joe and I have an inside joke between us whenever we see it at a thrift store. It’s like, “Whaddya know, it’s Donut Man.” Whenever we think it’s getting harder to find unique videos, though, we get handed something like the “Handmade Love” video and it keeps us going.
How much time do you spend looking for this stuff? Are most videos just submitted now?
Part of the reason we tour is so we can dig around the country for new stuff. But we’ve been lucky enough that we get about a box a week of donated videos. By the way, tell everyone in Richmond that if they have anything they think we need to see, to bring it to the show. We love to hear the stories of other people’s finds.
What are some elements of the perfect FFF video?
If there’s a celebrity involved, it’s always worth watching. Oh, white people rapping. When you see that, it’s like, “We’ve got something.” More than anything, though, whatever the video is trying to do, it has to fail at it in some entertaining way. We’ve also noticed that a lot of the videos we gravitate towards involve people with a lot of ambition and perhaps not so much talent. There’s something very American about that. We’re nowhere near the cynicism of Europeans when it comes to what we think we’re able to accomplish. And in a way, we’re people with a lot of ambition and very little talent, too, so we can relate.
Any plans for a televised edition of the Found Footage Festival?
We’d love to. Adult Swim would be a great fit for us, but we’re shooting a pilot for the Science Channel, of all places, in October. The format is like American Pickers, but instead of finding old antiques in barns, we’re finding old VHS tapes in thrift stores, meeting the people behind them, and bringing them with us onstage at shows. We were just on Jimmy Kimmel Live last week talking about our VHS finds and our book, and it’s kind of funny how nobody really watches TV in the traditional way anymore, but being on TV is still the barometer for how well your friends and family think you’re doing.
As the VHS format dies completely, is there a similar market in DVDs, or has there been a natural cut-off point where videos like these stopped being produced?
DVDs are sometimes good, but VHS has the highest batting average for what we’re looking for. Internet videos just don’t have the same appeal to us. The people in those have some kind of awareness of what they’re doing most of the time. Every once in a while, a modern meme comes out that hearkens back to the VHS days. Like, we recently we saw a collection of videos of old people trying to figure out their webcams, wondering how they work and inadvertently filming themselves. It was a huge hit, because it’s so rare to find that sort of lack of tech-savvy in this day and age. We’ve got a fairly recent video in our collection called “Who Needs A Movie?” It’s a commercial by this older couple pitching their video production services. They’re obviously new to video production and are making some mistakes along the way, but they are 100% earnest about their endeavor. It’s refreshing.
—
The Found Footage Festival presents their 2012 lineup of videos on Saturday, September 8 at Visual Arts Center (1812 W. Main St.). The performance starts at 8 PM. Admission is $10, and advance tickets can be ordered here: foundfootagefest2012rva.eventbrite.com. Come out and laugh at people with us at the Visual Arts Center on Saturday. You will not be disappointed.
