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Last Vaudevillian, The

Western Folklore, Fall 2001 by Lewis, Jon

The Last Vaudevillian. 1998. Directed by Jeffrey Ruoff. 30 min. 1/2" Video, Color. Distributed by Jeffrey Ruoff, Film/Video Department, Wright Theater, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont, 05753. n.p.

The travel documentary, as a genre, dates to the 1890s, back to the very first experiments linking the technological miracle of moving pictures to the traveling variety show. The Lumiere brothers, in their New York, Broadway et Union Square (1896), brought New York to Paris, and in so doing seemed also to bring the French audience, for the minute or so of the film's running time, to New York. Longer silent travelogues followed, the best of which is the Pathe brothers' 1908 Moscow Clad in Snow. Like the Lumiere brothers' brief early work on New York, Moscow Clad in Snow reveals the medium's peculiar ability to capture time and place and preserve it forever.

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In the United States, the father of the film travelogue was Burton Holmes. By the time he retired in 1950 after almost sixty years in the business, Holmes had presented the same show, a film with his own narration from the stage, over 8,000 times. The circuit that Holmes traveled continues to be served by new generations of travelogue filmmakers. One such filmmaker is John Holod, the subject of Jeffrey Ruoff's video The Last Vaudevillian, which follows Holod as he hawks his new film, Cuba at the Crossroads.

Like Moscow Clad in Snow, Cuba at the Crossroads captures an exotic place-a place made all the more exotic because it is at present inaccessible and virtually invisible to us here in the United States. Yet Ruoff focuses less on John Holod's film than on John Holod, the man himself Therein lies both the charm and the one failing of The Last Vaudevillian: We never hear Ruoff's voice and there seems little effort on his part to do much more than let Holod's character carry the day. In one respect this strategy pays off: Holod is a character. He's hardly shy and seems inclined to narrate not only the films he shoots but his life on the road as well. In fact, the road is the site for much of The Last Vaudevillian. There are plenty of shots out the window of Holod's motor home and scenes of Holod bunking down for the night "in the parking lots of some of America's finest hotels." Holod tells Ruoff that he has logged over 80,000 miles in the less than 18 months he has traveled with Cuba at the Crossroads, and he muses several times that his life resembles more that of a truck driver than of a documentary filmmaker.

There are similarities between John Holod and Mark Borchardt, the Wisconsin-based "filmmaker" who is the subject of Chris Smith and Sarah Price's Sundance Film Festival prize-winning documentary, American Movie (1999). Both Holod and Borchardt are American originals. They are funny, unselfconscious, and above all driven to make movies despite the odds against them, despite the ways in which their particular film projects clash with the conventions of popular filmed entertainment in America today. Much like Borchardt, Holod can be embarrassing as well as entertaining. My guess is that Ruoff cringed, as I did, at Holod's lame gags on stage and on film. Cuba at the Crossroads opens with a scene of Holod in Key West standing astride that strange monument that marks the nation's southernmost point. At the podium, Holod quips: "I bet you're wondering how I got to Cuba, what with the embargo and all." Then we see Holod on screen holding up a child's yellow-duckie float as he descends into the waves. The next shot shows Holod coming out of the water just outside Havana. The audience in the film mostly laughs, but the joke seems particularly naive when one considers how many Cubans have died trying to float their way north.

The Last Vaudevillian dwells on Holod's trip south from New York to Florida. There are some fabulous and funny scenes along the way; for example, the show in Hickory, North Carolina, which opens with Miss Hickory singing the national anthem, is a scream. The journey south seems at first a promise, yet we wonder how Holod's film about Cuba will play in Florida.

As we arrive in Florida, though, the film strangely digresses. It is possible that nothing happened during the Florida shows and that is why Ruoff ends the film without satisfying our curiosity. But even if the shows proved unremarkable, the anticlimax would have been worth seeing; an absence of controversy might have suggested that Holod's old-fashioned shtick does indeed transcend politics, that his film depicting (in his own words) "flowers, little kids, folk dancing, crafts like glass blowing, and eating, lots of eating," can bring us back to a time when Cuba meant something very different from what it means today.

The Last Vaudevillian would be well worth screening in a documentary film history class or a documentary filmmaking class.

JON LEWIS

Oregon State University

Corvallis

Last Vaudevillian, The

Western Folklore, Fall 2001 by Lewis, Jon

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