The Last Vaudevillian

Abstract

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, their New York, Broadway et Union Square (1896), brought New York to Paris, and 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 Snow. Like the Lumiere brothers' brief early work on New York, Moscow Clad Snow reveals the medium's peculiar ability to capture time and place and preserve it forever. In the United States, the father of the film travelogue was Burton Holmes. By the time he retired 1950 after almost sixty years 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 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 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 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. …