Previewing the Found Footage Festival

Found Footage: Vacation Bible School. Image courtesy of Found Footage Fest website.

Have you ever wondered what VHS tape heaven is like? I imagine it’s a lot like the Found Footage Festival, where discarded VHS tapes scavenged from garage sales, thrift shops and dumpsters find a second life providing a hilarious and sometimes touching anthropological commentary. Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher have been collecting VHS tapes since 1991 and founded the FFF in 2004. On Wednesday, Dec. 19,  the sixth volume of the festival will land in Milwaukee’s Turner Hall.

The festival’s rules are simple: all clips must derive from physical tape (no YouTube videos here), and each piece submitted must be unintentionally funny. The “unintentional” clause provides the festival with a crucial counterpoint to all its snark: someone, somewhere earnestly created this video now being presented to you as comedy. “Hand Made Love,” debuting at this year’s festival, is a masturbation instruction video for developmentally disabled men. And that’s absolutely, riotously funny, but it’s also poignant. We cannot assume that everyone just “gets” the basic principles of pleasure. There was obviously an inherent need for an instructional video, and this is the result.

Found Footage: Being Berry Berry Safe. Image courtesy of Found Footage Fest website.

Together, Prueher and Pickett have done work for The Onion, The Late Show with Dave Letterman, The Colbert Report, and MST3K. They won the 24 Beats Per Second Audience Award at SXSW 2007 for their feature-length documentary, Dirty Country. The Found Footage Festival, however, has become a full-time commitment. They sift through hundreds of hours of footage to find the 90 minutes that is comedic gold, then take that gold on tour for sell-out crowds across the country. When the tour is over, they resume finding new tapes, watching them, putting together a new 90-minute rollercoaster.

“Watching these videos can be excruciating or, worse yet, plain boring,” said Pruehler. “But just when we’re ready to throw in the towel, we find something that completely blows our mind and then we can’t wait to edit it and show it to people.”

Whether it’s McDonald’s training videos, creepy VHS “friends” that pause so you can talk back to them, or Dee, a crafter who loves sponge-painting so much she literally squeals with delight, the Found Footage Festival will make you laugh. And maybe cry. The tears might be from all the laughing. They might not be.

You can check out some of Prueher and Pickett’s finds at their website. Or you can just come to Turner Hall on Dec. 19. Tickets available at the box office and at pabsttheater.org.