The filmmakers behind "Chevolution" explain how Che Guevara's face ended up on all those T-shirts, posters, beer bottles and bikini bottoms
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.
Read entire article at Amy Reiter in Salon
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.