The Found Footage Festival has been around for well over a decade, touring the country with an analog aficionadoâs selection of pan-and-scan VHS ephemera. Unlike a lot of underground/bootleg/nostalgia-based shows, which typically depend on raw enthusiasm and audience discomfort, FFFâs productions are clever, tightly edited montages without any distortion or remixingâthink of them as a very ADD-friendly approach to surveying the especially goofy bits in your momâs old workout videos. And even after numerous iterations, this yearâs slate of videos is a fun mix of â80s and â90s time capsules ranging from satanic panic interviews to ineffective cat training techniquesâseasoned with some considerably more upsetting subjects that include, but are not limited to, ferret placentas, pee drinking, and problematic police training videos.
I got a chance to speak with Nick Prueher, who, along with co-host Joe Pickett, has been running FFF since its inception. The duo serves as engaging, excited narrators during FFFâs live shows, which helps leaven some of the more distressing, placenta-centric material. Here are Prueherâs thoughts on what makes FFF so consistently fun and so consistently strange.
On the Found Footage Festivalâs curatorial philosophy:
âOur approach is to present these in the way that weâve always done since we were in high school: have friends over and take them through a guided tour through our video collection. And just from a comedic standpoint, these videos are so weird that you kinda need a straight man. So weâre happy to provide the incredulous straight men to this very weird world of videos weâve discovered.â
On how the festival has evolved:
âWe just take it way too far now. In the first years of doing it, weâd be like, âI wonder if we could track down the guy in a Speedo dancing for elderly people,â and we do a little Google search and, âWelp, canât find them!â Now we hire a private investigator to help us find them. Weâll hire a detective and weâll go fly and meet that person. Weâll just go as far as we can to get the backstory, and to get videos that weâve never seen before. We... have nothing better to do. This is our full-time job.â
On the 200-plus tapes they inherited from The Late Show With David Lettermanâs âDaveâs Video Collectionâ archives:
â[Letterman writer] Steve Young said, âWould you be interested in Daveâs entire video collection?â They were literally gonna throw [them all] in a dumpster. If nothing else, weâre rescuing videos from landfills, so we jumped at the chance. And even betterâwhich shows you what kind of a guy Steve isâI showed him the montage of all the videos weâve cut from what heâd given us. And he said, âIâve just remembered, one thing we did in the â90s was solicit all our local CBS affiliates to send us their worst local commercials. Would you be interested in that as well?â And we were like, âBring it on!ââ
On the challenges of keeping the flame of VHS alive...
âFor a long time, we were sort of social pariahs. If youâre dating someone and they come over and youâve got thousands of VHS tapes in your apartment... it doesnât really bode well.â
...and on VHSâ current vogue status:
âI love the fact that VHS has had a resurgence. I donât think itâll ever be as sexy as like, collecting vinyl. Music is always cooler than movies, right? Thereâs not going to be VHS groupies any time soon. But it is cool that people are appreciating the bad tracking and the production value of VHS now, and appreciating those imperfections in the same way that people like to hear the hisses and pops in a record collection.â