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.

"Chicago 10": Cartooning the Sixties

Phil Nugent — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

When Alex Cox was trying (unsuccessfully) to make a movie version of Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and later, when Terry Gilliam was (successfully) trying to make it, both of them reportedly pissed off Thompson by announcing their intention to incorporate animated sequences into their films. The good doctor is said to have objected to the idea of having his masterpiece reduced to "a goddamn cartoon." This reticence, which in Thompson's case may have been related to a feeling that Garry Trudeau owed him some royalties, may turn out to be the key failing in Dr. Gonzo's longtime mission to make sense of the sixties. Since Gilliam's movie came out, a younger generation of filmmakers seems to have taken up the idea that the period can only be captured as a goddamn cartoon. A couple of years ago, with A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater used rotoscope animation to capture a look and feel that he found appropriate to Philip K. Dick's surreal vision of paranoia among druggie burn-outs. Now, the documentarian Brett Morgen (best known for The Kid Stays in the Picture, the movie version of the autobiography of Robert Evans — speaking of cartoons) has employed brightly colored "motion capture" technology for Chicago 10, his film about the trial of '60s political radicals that grew out of the violent chaos of the 1968 Democratic Convention. (At the start of the trial, the defendents were collectively known af "the Chicago eight"; they became better known as "the Chicago seven" after one of them, Bobby Seale, after being bound and gagged in the courtroom at the orders of Judge Julius Hoffman, had his case severed from that of the others. The title of the movie is meant as a way of paying tribute to all of them as well as their lawyers, Leonard Weinglass and the late William Kuntsler.)

Morgen, who was born not long after the convention, sees his relative youth as an advantage here. "The world simply did not need another movie about the ’60s made by someone from the ’60s," he says. "We weren’t making a movie about 1968 per se. I don’t want to smell patchouli. I don’t want to see bell-bottoms." He says that he was driven to return to the protest culture of the sixties as a way of challenging what he sees as the political apathy of his own generation and those younger — and towards that end, instead of the usual hippy-dippy music choices, he includes newsreel footage of Chicago cops thrashing protestors to the accompaniment of Rage Against the Machine. (The movie also features voice work by Jeffrey Wright as Seale, Liev Schrieber as Kunstler, Hank Azaria as Abbie Hoffman, Mark Ruffalo as Jerry Rubin, James Urbaniak as Rennie Davis, Dylan Baker as David Dellinger, and the late Roy Scheider as the famously demented Judge Hoffman.) Towards that end, the movie concentrates on the trial as an example of (often hilarious) political theater, a kind of media prank. Though by all accounts it is scrupulously accurate in its details, some of the original participants take exception to its revolution-can-be-fun angle. "This is an Abbie Hoffman story." says Tom Hayden. "Abbie was a great rebel, but there is a danger in theatricalizing history." To which Leonard Weinglass adds, "The film is entertainment, but it is not a political education." (It should be noted that the idea that the trial could best serve its political purposes as an example of living satire also dates back to the time of the trial itself; as early as 1970, just months after the trial ended, Bantam published a paperback collection of comic highlights from the court transcripts. It was titled The Tales of Hoffman and included a chortling introduction by the radical "political critic" Dwight Macdonald.) For his part, Morgen is so high on trying to "get the story out" that he's thrilled by the news that Steven Spielberg is thinking of making his own Chicago seven/ eight/ whatever movie: "We’ve been consulting with them and providing them with our databases." In the meantime, the surviving participants will continue to learn what Hunter Thompson already knew about the dangers of becoming a cartoon. Or as Leonard Weinglass says, complaining about his animated doppelganger's costume design, "Never in my life have I had a lavender suit."

The Screengrab : rage against the machine

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Chevolution"

"Chicago 10": Cartooning the Sixties