Che Part 1

This was a long movie. I watched a lot of fighting for this class. That is not my favourite thing to do and I didn’t feel this movie needed to have so much of it, but that’s just me. What was really accentuated for me while watching this was the idea of Che as a symbol that he could not, after a point, control himself. I feel like this was done in a few ways. Black and white scenes were interspersed in the colourful combat narrative. In them, Che was sitting waiting to be interviewed, being interviewed, and attending what looks like a gala of some kind. During the scenes Che talks with a women, who is probably one of many American journalists to interview him. These conversations eventually bleed, as voice-overs, into the combat scenes. We see Che and his comrades risking their lives as we listen to a conversation in which he discusses the Cuban revolution. From this juxtaposition it becomes obvious that nothing fatal will happen to him. (Obviously, we also already knew this if we knew nearly anything about Che before watching the movie,) but it also effectively blends images of Che’s day-to-day life in combat with his voice (and his ideology) that eventually make him an international symbol for revolution. We get to see how this happens. He becomes part of the public imaginary whether he wants to or not. (We see him acting rude while at an event with American politicians, which suggests he doesn’t care for his new reputation, but who knows.)

I think this is encapsulated in the scene where Che talks with one of the soldiers. (Sorry, can’t remember his name.) The soldier says something like: “after the revolution I’ll put you in a cage and tour the country and I’ll get rich.” They both laugh and in this way it’s a joke but it also isn’t. Like we saw in class, eventually Che’s image, (not necessarily his ideologies) is commodified.

We are effectively shown what types of mechanisms can go into the creation and maintenance of a symbol but I was never exactly sure why, or what exactly I was supposed to glean from this. In other words: the director shows us these phenomenon but I am not sure what he (or his film) tell us apart from the fact that they are happening. Perhaps that is all he wanted to make clear, and I appreciate that but I wanted more. I wanted more information generally, but it occurs to me that perhaps it would have been difficult to provide the kind of information I was looking for from such a removed point of view.

I would very much have liked to know what Che thought of his own symbolism (he is asked something along these lines at the end of the film but says very little on the subject.) What he thought of being in New York, at the UN, etc. Perhaps he was a very private person and that is why those things were omitted.