Beginning with this column, Cinema Retro's David Savage will be reporting from the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. In his first review, he critiques a new film about the cult of Che Guevara - and the irony of how a revolutionary who represented a brutal, totalitarian regime has somehow become a symbol of freedom and independence.
TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL 2008
Strike a Pose: Hasta La Chevolution
No one hates a sourpuss at a party more than me, so I regret to file
my inaugural report from the Tribeca Film Festival (technically a pre-festival
screening) on such a cheerless note and with windless sails. Maybe I chose
poorly from the films on offer before the festival gets underway on April 23rd,
but if what I saw last night, Chevolution, is evidence of what it takes
to get a documentary into one of the most high-profile film festivals in the
world, then all I can say is that the bar has been lowered so far that one need
only step over it.
Piquing my interest was the following synopsis: How did the iconic
image of Che Guevara end up on beer bottles and bikinis? This inquiry into the
ethics and aesthetics of appropriation investigates how the enduring symbol of Cuba's
revolution skyrocketed to fame and was ultimately devoured by its own worst
enemy: capitalism. Great! Sounds provocative and timely. I was all ready to
see a well argued thesis against branding and the banalization of
once-meaningful symbols, and even, I hoped, a useful corrective against the
radical-chic cult of the Marxist assassin and Argentine revolutionary Che
Guevara. No such luck.
What starts out to be a fairly absorbing investigation into the
history one of the most reproduced images in the history of photography -- that
being Cuban photographer Alberto Korda's black and white capture of the young
guerilla warrior at a funeral for the victims of the ship explosion in Havana's
harbor in 1960 -- instead turns into a dreadfully shallow homage to the
guerilla warrior himself, leaving countless stones unturned, a parade of
talking heads unchallenged, and a litany of problematic statements floated over
our heads like methane-filled balloons. Co-director Trisha Ziff even sees fit
to interview herself at one point with this helpful amplification: "He's a
superstar, and a superstar with a message," she explains to her own
camera. What message that is, exactly, she never explains, which serves as a
telling bookend to this entire, pointless film.
On the surface, the directors, Ziff and Luis Lopez, invite our indignation
over how an honest portrait of a communist revolutionary ended up becoming a
global brand at the service of capitalism. Fine. Irony noted. But another layer
of irony left unexplored, like much in this documentary, is how the portrait of
Guevara, Castro's collaborator (and expendable pawn) in creating the most
repressive, blood-soaked, totalitarian regime in the Western Hemisphere came to
be the symbol of freedom and revolt against oppression. Whom did he set free,
exactly? Care to take that up with the Cuban expatriates in Miami? (They don't, except for one. See
below.)
