Che anything

The filmmakers behind "Chevolution" explain how Che Guevara's face ended up on all those T-shirts, posters, beer bottles and bikini bottoms.

By Amy Reiter

Read more: Amy Reiter, Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Documentaries, Tribeca Film Festival

Courtesy of Red Envelope Entertainment

Still from the film "Chevolution."

May 5, 2008 | You know the picture all too well: the black beret flecked with a tiny white star; the grim, resolute set of the mouth under a patchy, perpetually hip mustache; the soft-looking flyaway locks of hair lifted as if by the breezes of change. And in those upward-cast eyes? Fury, disappointment, determination ... action.

Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary now dead more than 40 years, is everywhere. His iconographic image -- a photograph snapped at a mass funeral in Havana by Alberto "Korda" Díaz Gutiérrez and subsequently co-opted and adapted by publishers, artists and pretty much anyone with a Xerox machine -- has long been a symbol of protest and the little guy rising up against the ruling power. Today, it gazes at us from T-shirts, posters, album covers, coffee mugs, key chains, beach towels, beer bottles, cigarette packets, bikini bottoms -- and even, briefly, an advertisement for Smirnoff vodka. Korda's snapshot of Che, which he titled "Guerrillero Heroico," may well be the most widely reproduced image in the history of photography.

Why this image? Why Che? Those are the questions Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez set out to answer with their fascinating documentary "Chevolution," which this week played to sold-out crowds at the Tribeca Film Festival and will be shown in June at the Silverdocs festival just outside Washington, D.C. The film, which evolved from a book and museum exhibition by Ziff that has traveled the U.S. and is currently touring Europe, examines the image's power -- the mythology of the man within the frame and the vision of the man who snapped it -- and traces its journey from the pivotal revolutionary moment it was taken in 1960 to its first publication on the day of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 to its resurrection on the occasion of Che's death in 1967. It looks at the "perfect storm" of events that led to the photo's proliferation. Along the way, Ziff and Lopez spoke not only with Che biographers and historians, but also his friends, Korda's family and colleagues, artists who have used the image in their work, young people who have embraced the image, others who shun it -- and, yes, a few Che T-shirt wearers with no idea who Guevara was or what he stood for. Also in the interview mix: Gerry Adams, weighing in on the image's power in Ireland; Antonio Banderas, who played Che in "Evita"; Gael García Bernal, who played him in "Motorcycle Diaries"; and Bolivian Sen. Don Antonio Peredo.

Salon was curious about Ziff and Lopez's perspective, so we caught up with them by phone mid-festival.

Trisha, what brought you to curate an exhibit and make a film about the phenomenon of this one iconic photo? What was the moment of inspiration?

Ziff: Really the whole thing began in 2001 when Alberto Korda died. I had met him a few times in Mexico and I was reading the obituaries. Here was a man who'd photographed all his life and he was essentially being remembered for a single image. What impacted me was how somebody's life in our culture is just reduced down so drastically to very specific things. It's almost like we become our own commodity. And obviously in his case the world remembers Korda for taking the Che image. So the representation of his life was really a 60th of a second. That had a real impact on me -- that fleetingness of our reality.

Right, we really never know what we'll be remembered for, which moment will define us.

Ziff: We think having our children or something else we did is what made our lives and who we are, and yet the world sees things very differently. That discourse in my head got me thinking of the image. And I tried to write a short story about it and failed miserably because essentially I'm a curator, so I thought, well, I wonder what would happen if you did an exhibition about only one image. I wonder if they -- the viewer, the audience -- would find it interesting enough. So it became a curatorial exercise for me: Could I do that? Then it began as an exhibition at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside -- and it spiraled out of control, which is what happens with that image. It's amazing. It's like a rolling stone. It just goes on. And that in some ways has happened with the film now too.

The image really does seem to have a life of its own -- or really many, many lives: as a sign of political protest, an image in pop art, a fashion statement. Can you talk about the factors that led to its proliferation?

Ziff: I think there are very specific elements that are in many ways serendipitous. The image was taken in 1960 at this very powerful moment, when a ship bringing arms to the revolution exploded in Havana harbor. Castro thought it was the work of the CIA -- they call it this big terrorist act against the Cuban people at the beginning of the revolution -- though it's never been proved that it was. But it was a mass funeral. It was a huge moment, a watershed moment in the history of the revolution. The image was taken at the moment that Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for help, obviously before the missile crisis.

It's on the roll of film along with all the other images Korda took that day of Castro holding up the different explosives that were found on the boat. And Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were in Cuba at that time too and they're also on that roll of film. So you have this kind of historic roll of film, but [the Che image] never spoke to the precise moment -- it wasn't published the next day in the newspaper. And then when it is published, it's published as a kind of stock head-shot of Che Guevara, advertising a conference that he's going to speak at -- and the time it's published is the day of the invasion of the Bay of Pigs. So you have this incredible moment when it's taken and this other very important historic moment in the beginnings of the revolution and the invasion. And then it kind of gathers momentum, and when it's published the third time it's in the context of the death of Che. It's held high on these placards protesting the murder of Che by the CIA in essence with the Bolivian Army, and that's a moment that explodes in itself. So context is a huge part of the image.

And yet it has spun way out of its original context ...

Next page: "Our world is saturated by Che T-shirt wearers"