Since the advent of YouTube, there has been no shortage of bizarre, hilarious, and disturbing video footage available at the touch of a button. Sometimes, it’s all in the same clip. But as the years have gone by, the flow has become a deluge; friends and family share every new clip with an “OMG” or “LOL,” crushing inboxes and Facebook feeds with an overwhelming wave of what, as often as not, turns out to be pretty mediocre. While the Web offers abundance, it often lacks in curation.
That’s where Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher step in. The pair’s Found Footage Festival, which comes to Amherst Cinema on October 16 for a 9 p.m. show, offers up a carefully chosen catalogue of some of our culture’s oddest leftovers. It all began in 1991, when the duo came across a creepily cheery McDonald’s custodial training video that centered around “McC,” a disembodied spirit of cleanliness that spoke to custodial trainees. As their collection of tapes grew—they still choose to focus on finding physical media, eschewing the ease of digital collection—a show was born, with Pickett and Prueher providing live commentary on the collection to audiences around the country.
For this 10th anniversary tour, the pair have put together the best of the best so far to give viewers an hour and a half tour of recorded ridiculousness. Things get underway with Special Delivery, a 1994 video made for dog breeders, before moving on to Butt Camp (exercise division); the instructional How to Have Cybersex on the Internet (spoiler alert: there are nipples); and new footage of John and Johnny, two early home-shopping hosts whose wild improvisations—their live product pitches often veered disastrously south—have become a Found Footage favorite.
For all the needling the hosts do, they do it from a warmly bemused place, as evidenced by their orchestration of a John and Johnny reunion. Genuinely touching, the reunion brings the pair together again after more than two decades. After briefly reliving their old roles as pitchmen, they then turn the tables on their hosts by embarrassing them at a local sports bar. Pickett and Prueher, one feels, couldn’t have been happier.
Also this week: Amherst is screening another blast from the past this Wednesday when it brings in Stop Making Sense, director Jonathan Demme’s (Silence of the Lambs) 1984 film about musical act Talking Heads. Filmed over three nights in December of 1983, the film captures the band doing what it does best. Unlike many musical documentaries, Stop Making Sense dispenses with the extraneous bits—there are, ironically, no talking heads here—and focuses simply on the music. For a good hour and a half, Demme’s cameras drink in the performance as lead singer David Byrne leads his troupe through a set of their unusually inventive, infectiously entertaining music.
And just down the road at Amherst College, the school’s German Film Series continues with Rosenstrasse, a 2003 film from Margarethe von Trotta. A drama based on a little-explored act of civil courage during the Third Reich, it tells the story of a group of gentile German women whose Jewish husbands faced deportation in 1943 Berlin. Refusing to submit, the women staged a week-long protest in the street outside of the city’s main detention center until their husbands were returned to them. It screens Thursday at 4 and 7:30 p.m. at the college’s Stirn Auditorium.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
