J. Hoberman on "Che" in VQR

Phil Nugent — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

The excellent new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, which is devoted to the fifitieth anniversary of the Cuban revolution, includes a J. Hoberman essay on Steven Soderbergh's epic biopic Che, starring Benecio Del Toro as Ernesto Guevara. "Within eighteen months of his death, this instant immortal had been embalmed—in the form of Egyptian matinee idol Omar Sharif—by Twentieth Century Fox, as the subject of a tediously self-important and ridiculously old-fashioned Hollywood biopic. Early evidence of the hyperreal: noting the production’s budget, John Leonard observed in the New York Times Magazine that making a movie about revolution was considerably more expensive than the revolution itself, 'about $10,000 an hour.' ” Hoberman describes the intentions behind that clueless turkey (which co-starred Jack Palance, in a Silly Putty nose, as Fidel Castro), as having been "in the tradition of Fox’s 1952 Viva Zapata—a melancholy, heartfelt, prestigious, star-spangled tribute to revolutionary failure" starring a "hardcore New Left action tough guy." Actually, as Che's resurrection via T-shirt image (the history of which was described in the recent documentary Chevolution shows, he was the guerrilla as rock star. Consciously or not, most of his modern fans understand him as being part of the lineage of hip rock martyrs that includes Jimi, Janis, the lost Rolling Stone, and the Lizard King. More recently, Gael Garcia Bernal played the hunky young (pre-"Che") Ernesto in the Sundance-friendly The Motorcycle Diaries, based on a road trip the lad took with a buddy, a trip that was immortalized in a book that appeared more than twenty years after his death. Directed by Walter Salles (with Robert Redford acting as executive producer), it was a gorgeous-looking movie that gave receptive audiences the chance to admire it's hero's liquid eyes and bone structure while he visited peasants in pastoral settings and felt his yet-unformed social conscience become all tingly.

Is Soderbergh's Che a history lesson or the latest act of what Hoberman calls "co-optive commodification"? It "remains a film object—a thing to be experienced. The movie demands to take its time, with both parts taken in at a single sitting." Hoberman, who saw the film at last year's Cannes Film Festival before Soderbergh took a scalpel to it, reports that "Many initial viewers were confounded to the degree that Che appeared as a non- or even an anti-biopic. Despite a stellar performance by Benicio Del Toro, who had initiated the project some years ago with Soderbergh as producer and Terrence Malick attached as writer and director, Che presents its subject almost entirely as the protagonist in the context of two specific events. Moreover, the director seemed to keep his distance and reserve his judgment. Skillfully didactic, as well as nervily dialectical, this feel-good/feel-bad combat film thus had less in common with the touchy-feely Motorcycle Diaries than with Peter Watkins’s spare, self-reflexive reconstruction of the Paris Commune, La Commune (Paris, 1871)." However, since its premiere, "Soderbergh has tweaked his movie's first half in ways that soften its strangeness and blunt its intellectual range." These additions, which interrupt the story of the revolution with flash-forwards to Che's life as a political celebrity during a trip to New York, serve the purpose of "Annotating the past with the 'present' and tightening the movie’s overall sound/image connections," even as "these inserts do allow for another sort of dialectic, but their presence serves to subtly normalize Soderbergh’s distancing strategy. (Or what was taken to be his strategy. “With all the subtitles, we thought it was Jean-Luc Godard,” a colleague joked.)"

"Che," Hoberman writes, "is an act of will rather than a work of art, overtly concerned with technical issues—the revolution’s and its own." In short, it is a movie by Steven Soderbergh, a director who (with his first feature, sex, lies, and videotape) helped invent independent American moviemaking as a concept (and, in part, as a marketing concept); who, with his comeback movie, Out of Sight, showed how just how much smarts and technical pizzazz could be applied to a solid piece of romantic-action-comedy goods while accepting the material on its chosen level; and who has spent the last decade or so veering from one extreme to the next, trying to find the ideal balance between commercial work that won't rot the brain and experimental work that tries to speak to at least part of the mass audience. As Hoberman sees it, "Che is superb filmmaking—forcefully edited, purposefully repetitive. Everything is foreshadowed; each sequence has its parallel. There is no scene that cannot be seen as part of an ongoing argument." But how many movies made by big Hollywood players wouldn't be embarrassed by a phrase like "an ongoing argument"?"Soderbergh is less a driven auteur or even an enthusiastic cinephile than he is a highly intelligent technician who sets himself a problem and goes about solving it. "

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Chevolution"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Trisha Zitt and Luis Lopez's documentary Chevolution may be the closest thing you'll ever get to see to an episode of Behind the Music or E! True Hollywood Story about an image. The movie stars the face of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, as it was captured in a photograph taken in 1960 that was mass reproduced in poster form on its way to turning into an iconic fashion and advertising image. (One of Guevara's most sympathetic biographers, Jon Lee Anderson, appears in the film sitting at a table with a coffee mug adorned with Che's kisser.) The most fascinating information in the movie is about the man who got this avalanche rolling, Alberto Diaz, popularly known as Korda. Korda had been a high-flying fashion photographer before developing a political conscience during Castro's war against the Batista dictatorship, during which he became a photojournalist vowing to use his skills to serve the revolution. (He wound up serving as Castro's personal photographer.) But he retained the eye and the instincts of a fashion photographer, and that's what made his news photos continue to stand out. They were certainly in evidence in the photo of Che, which was taken when Guevara showed up at the docks after an explosion aboard a Belgian cargo ship delivering a load of munitions. One of Korda's old colleagues says that he doesn't believe that he realized that he'd caught anything special, because he only took two or three shots when he had Guevara in his line of sight, and if he'd thought he had the makings of an important photo, he would have snapped ten or twelve. Maybe so, but Korda must have noticed at some point that he'd gotten a portrait of the camera-shy Guevara looking especially intense and fiery-eyed. Instinctively, he proceeded to crop the other figures out of the shot, leaving something that looks very much like a movie star's head shot.

Korda was unable to sell the picture to the Cuban newspapers in 1960, but years later, it fell into the hands of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, an Italian who had recognized the potential of easily reproducible, easily disseminated graphic posters as a political medium and who was not above profiting from this insight. Korda was above it; because of his devotion to the ideals of the socialist revolution, he declined to copyright the image or even make a public show of taking credit for it as it was being widely proliferated around the world. Shortly before he died in 2001, Korda did begin to go after companies that exploited Che's image by associating it with products he deemed inappropriate to the point of being degrading, such as cigarettes and booze, an ongoing battle that is now overseen by his daughter. Among the things they regarded as tarnishing to Che's memory is apparently leftist sludge rock, because they also went after Rage Against the Machine for decorating their drum kit with Che's face. The movie includes a wistful Tom Morello recalling how he and the guys used to think of Che as a fifth member of the band until a squad of lawyers showed up to announce that they were there to audition for the role of Yoko Ono.

Chevolution would be a stronger documentary if it included a meatier picture of who Che himself was and what he did and stood for. Most of the people who speak about him in the movie's first half do so in a tone that's respectful bordering on worshipful. That includes Gael Garcia Bernal and Antonio Banderos, both of who have played Che in movies--I guess Omar Sharif had prior commitments--and who speak of him, not unintelligently, as a fellow celebrity. In the movie's final third, which shows how thoroughly the Che image has entered the advertising culture, we do get to hear from a few young campus-conservative types, one of whom rants bitterly about the shallow ignorance of the radical chic and expostulates that if you want to live in a doctrinaire police state that tells you what to think and what you can say and how to live your life, then you should definitely wear Che's face on your T-shirt. (At the screening I attended, one guy in the audience chose this moment to applaud and hollar, "Yeah!" Ah, New York.) 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.

The Screengrab : chevolution

J. Hoberman on "Che" in VQR

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Chevolution"