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The woman is suddenly, inexplicably topless, and that’s when the tutorial gets interesting. Nick Prueher, cocreator and cohost of the Found Footage Festival, can’t stop thinking about his current favorite find, a 1997 instructional VHS titled “How to Have Cybersex on the Internet.” Its nudity makes it an unconventional educational film but not, in Prueher’s words, “sexy enough to get off to.”
Awkward naïveté and weirdness—these are the hallmarks of Found Footage. For ten years, Prueher and cohort Joe Pickett have dug through boxes of old cassettes and watched hundreds of hours of horrible exercise videos and home movies in hopes of finding gems like “Cybersex” to share with audiences. Tours of their stage show have expanded each year—they visited 140 cities in all 50 states and overseas in 2013—and fans love the duo’s introductory quips and reverent attitude toward the videos’ oddball stars.
The elephant in the chat room is, of course, YouTube where anyone can share pointless videos. The guys strive to show exclusive footage—if it can be found elsewhere on the Internet, they won’t include it—and Prueher insists that the live show is more than just a big projection screen. “It’s easy to forget the communal aspect,” says Prueher. “Whatever snark that’s there when you’re watching a video on someone’s laptop just disappears when you’re sitting in public, in the dark, laughing your face off.”
For the tenth anniversary, Prueher and Pickett not only collected their favorite new clips, but revisited best-loved clips from their early years and even filmed a reunion between two Fest favorites, America’s Value Network salesmen John and Johnny. But in the end, it’s about preserving the strange, golden era of videocassettes. “We don’t have a temperature-controlled vault,” admits Prueher. “But maybe a storage facility in Queens is what VHS deserves.”
Found Footage Festival screens its latest finds at BAM Rose Cinemas Fri 25 and Anthology Film Archives Sat 26.