Tribeca Dispatch. 1.

You could call it the last stencil standing. Ernesto "Che" Guevara failed miserably to bring about world revolution. Yet he's outlasted even Mao Zedong in the battle of self-promotion, long after his death in a doomed revolutionary campaign in Bolivia in 1967.

Updated through 4/27.

At the Tribeca Film Festival, Chevolution, directed by Luis Lopez and Trisha Ziff, examines the persistence of Che's image through the Cuban Revolution (which eventually drove Guevara abroad) to the student movements of the late 1960s to Woodstock to the stores selling t-shirts and bikinis around the world, from Brazil to Baghdad. Guevara could never defeat communism, but his picture made some people rich.

The documentary takes a long time to make its point, establishing Guevara as a major figure in the Cuban Revolution, with plenty of archival imagery to document the triumph of bearded commandantes (bearded because they were hiding in the mountains) over the perfumed and tuxedoed corrupt US-supported Cuban dictatorship. As expected, Guevara emerges as a charismatic man of purity and courage, a martyr to dreams of turning the wretched of the earth into revolutionaries with beards and berets. It's straight out of the catechism.

A parallel story in the film is more of a revelation - we met Alberto Korda, the fashion photographer and boulevardier who documented the barbudos' rise to power, complete with photo-martyrologies of bloody demonstrations in Havana before Castro's defeat of the Batista regime. Photography would be a weapon in the propaganda war that accompanied Castro's guerrilla campaign. (We already saw this in the Spanish Civil War, when photographs of children killed in bombings were put on posters and on the front pages of newspapers by the Republicans who were under siege from fascist troops led by Francisco Franco.)

As Chevolution tells the story, Korda began as a Cuban Helmut Newton and transcended his beginnings in fashion. He discovered what Europeans and American already knew, that photography could be leveraged to achieve political ends. The folklore about his relationship with Guevara is that the Argentine commandante, who was camera-shy, insisted that Korda cut sugarcane for a week, which Korda did dutifully before Guevara agreed to a portrait. The photo that was eventually silk-screened around the world was taken by Korda in 1960, after La Coubre, a Belgian ship carrying munitions, exploded while being unloaded. The evidence pointed to official incompetence by Raul Castro in allowing the cargo to be unloaded so close to shore. The official version blames the CIA. The photo of a defiant Guevara was taken by Korda while Guevara and Castro presided over a huge rally commemorating the casualties of the explosion, which the Cubans denounced as an act of US terrorism. The mythic picture, cropped to show Guevara from below silhouetted against a solid background, was born at a mythic event.

The man who sent the picture into the global marketplace, after Guevara vanished for a year or two in the mid-1960s, was Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, an Italian publisher, who went to Havana to buy two prints of the photo in 1967. Korda gave the picture to the Italian for nothing because he was "a friend of the revolution." Feltrinelli turned around and made posters which were all the rage in Europe. Guevara's Bolivian Diary, with Korda's photo on the cover, sold more than a million copies. Korda did not get a penny, and the image took off.

In exploring the way that the Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick turned the photograph into a psychedelic image in accordance with the consumer tastes of 1968, the documentary turns to Gerry Adams, the former IRA leader, who tells of Guevara's appeal to generations of desperate Catholics in Northern Ireland. "I wanted his image to breed like rabbits," Fitzpatrick said. Inexplicably, we're never told of a multiple-paneled colorized Guevara grid of photographs that were attributed in 1968 to Andy Warhol. In fact, the work was a forgery by Warhol hanger-on Gerard Malanga. When Warhol heard of the fake, he cynically certified it as his own work, ensuring that he would profit if it were reproduced. (For Cuban Pop Art inspired by the photograph, see the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, which is now hosting a huge exhibition of Cuban Art, much of it on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Havana.) And on the image went, to the dorm room walls and to a black hole of t-shirts.

Ultimately, the Korda family would hire lawyers to stop the use of the photograph to sell harmful products like liquor, tobacco and perfume. In a famous case, the family got $50,000 from Smirnoff Vodka, which used the picture without permission.

Plenty of Che-worship is on the screen, but there's more than that in this film, some of it even critical. We're reminded of Guevara's participation in violent retribution in the early days of the Revolution, a fact that you rarely hear about from well-meaning admirers, and we're also reminded that the government which Guevara helped install is an undemocratic military dictatorship. "If you like undemocratic governments, then you should wear this t-shirt," says one young man who is not practicing Che-nuflection.

We hear from Antonio Banderas (Che in Evita) and from Gael García Bernal (Che in The Motorcycle Diaries), and from the biographer Jon Lee Anderson, who seems determined to achieve a John Malkovich speaking style. (How about Malkovich as Che?) We don't hear from Omar Sharif, who played Che in Richard Fleischer's solemnly laughable Che! (1969), in which Jack Palance played Castro. To get an inside perspective on that film and the emerging myth just a few years after Che's death, find John Leonard's entertaining report of his visit to the set in the New York Times Magazine of December 8, 1968.

Besides Sharif, the documentary would also have benefited from the consumers who are buying the Che image. Are generations of romantic mindless youth who went to see Che as Jack Kerouac in The Motorcycle Diaries keeping Che-commerce going, or is it a case of Che being a perennial among images of Bob Marley, James Dean, Tupac Shakur, Jim Morrison, Elvis, Subcommandante Marcos or whoever else happens to be the rebel heart-throb of the week? Thank God that Che's beret has not been given lifetime fashion tenure, although the documentary does make the point that the Black Panthers adopted the beret thanks to Che's fashion leadership.

Another question left unasked and unanswered is why Che's image has a much broader global reach than Fidel Castro's. Was he just better looking? Or could it be that Che's reputation was saved by the fact that he never exercised power or that his admirers never bothered to learn too much about him? Bear in mind that the Che-mania isn't simply the case of the longevity of a handsome face and a seductive myth. It shows us how a logo can survive, long after its historical associations are forgotten, if they were ever known at all.

For more, listen my report about the persistence of the Che image that aired on NPR in October 2004. Check out, too, J Hoberman's "Ernesto Goes to the Movies" in the October 2004 American Prospect.

More from Tribeca here.

Updates, 4/26: For the IFC, Stephen Saito talks with Trisha Ziff.

Chevolution's "clean, tight narrative is both poignant and entertaining, and clearly benefits from Ziff's deep understanding of photography and Lopez's previous documentary work (The King of Kong, Shut Up & Sing)," writes Mike Raffensperger at Zoom In Online.

Updates, 4/27: "Chevolution would be a stronger documentary if it included a meatier picture of who Che himself was and what he did and stood for," writes Phil Nugent in ScreenGrab. "One way or another, the movie does demonstrate that the Che image is now so cut off from actual history as to mean whatever the person who wears it thinks it ought to mean, which is one reason it's had a much longer shelf life than Che himself did."

"Just about all of it is engaging, making it less a dry history lesson and more of an examination of how pop culture and capitalism conspires to make Marxist revolutionaries into corporate logos," writes Joel Keller at Cinematical.

Posted by dwhudson at April 25, 2008 2:12 AM