The iconic picture of Che Guevara has become more a fashion accessory than political statement. That transformation is traced in a fascinating new film, Peter Calder reports
The young man at Los Angeles' Venice Beach leans on the apehanger handlebars of his bicycle and explains the picture on his T-shirt.
Che Guevara was the man who invented those, ah, mojitos," he says, naming the rum cocktail that is synonymous with Cuba.
Cut to an Asian woman who says she likes Che because "admires his lifestyle" and says she thinks he is - the present tense is telling - a punk. A few frames later, the camera captures another T-shirt on which the famous portrait bears the legend: "I don't know who the [f***] this is."
In a few bold strokes, the new documentary film Chevolution stakes out its thematic territory. After more than 40 years of co-option, manipulation and decontextualising, the image that is surely the world's most reproduced has become as much a fashion accessory as a political statement.
Slowly and remorselessly it has morphed from the portrait into a symbol of struggle into a pop icon and finally into a logo. In the most piercing of ironies, last century's most famous Marxist has been hijacked by capitalism to sell everything from vodka to lingerie. It has lost a singular meaning and assumed millions.
As co-director Trisha Ziff, who is also one of the film's talking heads remarks, "Anyone can invest their fantasies in those eyes."
The picture - the wispy hair curling from under the starred beret, the defiant gaze fixed on the middle distance - began to gain international currency in the months after Guevara, captured while fomenting an abortive peasant revolution in Bolivia, was summarily and messily executed. Indeed, the film suggests, the vibrant portrait known as "Guerrillero Heroico" was seen as a counter to the images of Che's glassy-eyed corpse that had been widely circulated by news agencies. In any event, it seemed to emerge fully-formed as an icon of struggle and protest. In the following months it was seen in demonstrations on the streets of Paris, Prague and Belfast, and in protests in American cities against the bloodbath in Vietnam. Yet oddly it had not - in any organised way - served that symbolic function in the land of its birth. It was, in short, the shot seen around the world long before it came home.
In Cuba now it is dense with political meaning: Che stares down from billboards everywhere, above stirring slogans ("Hasta la victoria siempre" - "Onwards, ever onwards, to victory" is the favourite). A large wrought-iron version covers the entire side of a high building overlooking the Plaza de la Revolucion in Havana.
But it was initially not seen as even worth publishing. The image was the first of two frames captured on March 5, 1960, by Alberto Korda, who, as a famous fashion photographer, had been a high-living celebrity in pre-Castro Havana. The revolution that had toppled the Batista dictatorship was barely two months old and a shipment of munitions had exploded in Havana harbour (CIA sabotage has been implausibly alleged but incompetence is more a likely cause) killing more than 70 people and deeply denting the national mood of liberation euphoria.
As Castro addressed the crowd at a mass funeral, Korda, now a newspaper lensman, was watching through his viewfinder. Suddenly, and for only a few seconds, Che stepped on to the stage to Castro's left. The photographer had time to shoot one horizontal and one vertical, and the man Castro had dubbed El Comandante was gone.
Interestingly, Korda would later recall Che's expression as "encabronado y dolente" - the first word is local slang for pissed off, the second captures a sense of sadness and deep empathy. But the photographer's assessment has long been swept aside by others' projections. Che's sadness has morphed into resolution, his anger into defiance. He has become the poster boy for dissent against a thousand oppressions, real and imagined, in every corner of the world.
The papers next day carried the logical news shots - of Castro - and Korda printed the Che shot just for himself. Later, the fashion photographer who knew sex appeal when he saw it cropped the frame, removing a palm tree and the profiled half-face of a man looking up at Castro, and rotating the image a few degrees clockwise so as to lend the figure a more front-on boldness. An icon was born.
English-born, Mexico-based Ziff is not a filmmaker but a curator. Her film, a fascinating detective story that uncovers the unusual route by which the Korda photo made its way into history, started as an exhibition.
"It comes out of a history of curatorial thinking," she says. "As curators, we are storytellers. We build our environments in three-dimensional spaces and we ask you to walk through. You never walk through in a linear way - you move around and graze - so it's an experience that we can't control as we can when you are sitting in a cinema. But we are narrators in our own way.
"I've always thought the challenge is: Can I tell a story in a way so that you the audience focus on a single image so that you understand something about the process of looking? So then it became a question of: which image? Do I do a Last Supper show or use the Pieta [the Virgin Mary holding the dead Christ] or one of the famous images of the Dustbowl by Margaret Bourke White?"
At last, she settled on the image that she says is probably the world's most reproduced and is certainly the most romanticised. The show was created at the California Museum of Photography, before going on the road: Mexico City, New York, London, Amsterdam.
"It was a huge exhibition that had to be edited down in each country and I encouraged each country to put in their own Che - and so it would have its own story in that country and its own appearance in that country."
And, as if to prove the central thesis about the malleability of meaning, the exhibition took on different meanings - and bore subtly different titles - in different places.
"In Mexico it related to the events in Chiapas [the base of the armed insurgency of the Zapatista] and it was very popular in a mass-cultural way; in New York it was widely critiqued by Cuban Americans and there were protests around the show; at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, it was absolutely about design and they filtered out the politics; and Amsterdam embraced it in a kind of sentimental looking-back-at-the-60s way.
"Each venue was like a T-shirt and it took on its own identity and I learnt very quickly to let that be OK, to not mark it but to let it become its own hybrid in all these different cities."
The film passes lightly over Che's bloody record - though it does remark that posterity has "disarmed" the post-revolutionary executioner and surrounded him with doves and flowers.
"We do briefly raise the issue that there are some people who find the image offensive," says Ziff. "He is a deeply problematic character, but the film is not about him; it's about the phenomenon of that image. It is intended for a generation who haven't grown up through the radicalism of the 60s, who wear the T shirt because it's cool and may not know about Che."
She recalls the gaffe of Cameron Diaz who visited Peru with a handbag featuring a red star, unaware that Maoist guerrillas waging a decades-long civil war had killed tens of thousands of innocent peasants.
"For her it was a fashion statement but a fashion statement in Venice Beach may not be a fashion statement somewhere else. Kids don't associate the star with Mao. They wear a hammer and sickle and they don't think of Stalin's purges. Perhaps the only image that cannot be co-opted is the Nazi swastika. It is what it is what it is. It doesn't become hip and cool."
Interestingly, we may be witnessing the end of the Che image's iconic power. During the US election campaign, Shepard Fairey, the extremely hip pop artist behind the Obey Giant image among others, turned an Associated Press photograph of Barack Obama into a poster, emblazoned with words like "Hope". The image, says Ziff, "carries a new epicness".
"It's the first time I have seen the Che image challenged in our modernity," she says. "Perhaps it will take over."
LOWDOWN
What: Chevolution, a movie how the photo of the revolutionary became a fashion emblem
When & where: Chevolution screens as part of the World Cinema Showcase at the Academy Cinema in Auckland from April 16.