| . | 04/17/2008
Chevolution
By: Ted Faraone
Ernesto "Che" Guevara Photo by Alberto Korda
Tribeca Film Festival Review
“Chevolution”
Reviewed 15 April 2008
Three stars out of five. $6.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $10.50.
THE ENDURING POWER OF AN ICONIC IMAGE
Alberto Korda’s iconic 1960 photograph of bearded, beret sporting Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine physician turned Cuban revolutionary, may, as “Chevolution” suggests, be the most famous photograph of all time. Its Candide-like journey from Havana news photo to commercial symbol in the capitalist world is skillfully outlined in the documentary helmed by Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez.
Docu is conventional in approach, beginning with the story of Alberto “Korda” Diaz, Havana fashion photographer and man-about-town who became a news photographer after Castro’s government shut down the nation’s advertising agencies in 1960. Parallel storyline traces the radicalization of Ernesto Guevara, Argentine medical student, whose outrage over conditions among Latin America’s poor led him to Fidel Castro in 1956. He quickly became the most radical of acolytes. Archival footage and still photographs, mostly black and white, are intercut with contemporary (color) interviews with those who knew Guevara and Korda, including a cadre of Cuban photographers, Korda’s daughter, Diana Diaz, and actors Antonio Banderas (Che in “Evita”), Gael Garcia Bernal (Che in “Motorcycle Diaries”), and Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein. Package is laced together with English-language narration by Miguel Najera with Spanish-language interviews subtitled in English.
Pic’s halfway mark has Korda shooting the famous photo, which did not become widely circulated until after Guevara’s death in 1967. Korda gave two prints to a leftist Italian publisher who turned them into posters by the hundreds of thousands. Since Korda had not registered a copyright – indeed, Cuba did not join the international copyright tribunal until the 1990s -- the image was, more or less in the public domain. In true capitalistic form, the iconic image of the most Stalinist of Cuban Communists was snapped up free of charge to hawk everything from bikinis to beer. “Chevolution” offers a simple explanation: It was a sort of artistic perfect storm. A handsome young man, dead before age 40, a symbol of protest with just the right amount of hair and beard, looking more than a little late ‘60s counterculture-ish, burst into world consciousness just in time for the leftist political convulsions of 1968. The public emergence of the Che image coincided with the height of the pop-art movement, wherein it developed a life of its own, often, ironically, a life that has nothing to do with the culture of political protest. It was manipulated into Christ-like figures, flower power symbols, and caricatures for pop musicians. Young people often don’t know who Guevara was when they don a t-shirt bearing his face. He’s just “cool.” In one Bolivian town, he is worshipped as a Catholic saint.
Near the end of his life, Korda took issue with the commercialization of his photograph and began to assert his copyright – as a means, his daughter says, of halting inappropriate use of the image, but the large sums of money Korda and his estate have won in court may belie that.
Pic manages to contrast Che the man with his politics and accomplishments without taking sides. Guevara was undoubtedly a fearless idealist who believed in uplifting the poor. He was also a Stalinist with a capital “S” who led the disastrous collectivization of Cuban industry as a cabinet minister and presided over the collapse of the Peso as head of the central bank. He was involved in executions of opponents of the Castro regime. His life ended with two disastrous adventures – an attempt to raise an indigenous Communist army in The Congo and the instigation of a doomed revolt against the Bolivian government. He died in the latter, and the Bolivian regime’s public display of his Christ-like corpse no doubt contributed to his legend.
Pic’s only significant flaw is its length. The second half drags. Half an hour could easily be cut from its 90 minute runtime.
Tech credits are adequate. Pic carries no rating, but some nudity and the F-bomb will need editing for television. Other than language, nothing in it is unsuitable for children. Ironically, “Chevolution” is presented by Red Envelope Entertainment, a unit of Netflix. One cannot be more capitalist.
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