David N. Lorenzen in modern folkloristic terms categorises legends as “stories set in real, historical time about important cultural andpolitical heroes.” He writes on how heroic legends invarious cultural geographies are circulated and constantly changed and re-circulated orally, sometimes along with visual icons, to articulate religious, cultural and political beliefs and ideologies of a particular group of individuals. Legend of Che Guevara falls in the category of legends such as of King Authur, Robin Hood, William Tell and Wyatt Erap. Che stands out among other such legends; he has a spread across the globe, irrespective of cultural and linguistic variations.
My encounter with Che was through reading of Jorge Castañeda’s English translation of Compañero during mycollege days. Coincidently, the third day after reading the book, while I was travelling by a Chennai sub-urbantrain I saw a teenager wearing a t-shirt with Che’s image. Curiously I went to him, and asked him whose image itwas; the boy said that he never had any idea. Next, I enquired why he was wearing an image of a man whom he never knew and the boy shot back ‘I like his face!’ Che was assasinated in 1967 and I wondered how washe so popular in 1999 unlike other revolutionary leaders. Long after other historical icons have diminished in time, Che still survives through Frank Korda’s photograph;giving immortality to a legend circulated around as a photograph.
The famous image of a steely eyed Che was shot on March 5 , 1960 by Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, better known as Alberto Korda, a fashion photographer by profession and photojournalist by passion, Korda had to turn to the infant Cuban revolution’s official newspaper ‘Revolucion’ tomake ends meet. The event was a memorial funeral service for victims of the La Coubre (ship carrying Belgianarms shipment to Cuba) explosion. Photographs of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir on Korda’s film roll were much more valuable for Cuban newspapers; hence Che’s image was not published. Yet Korda made apersonal cropped print.
The photo became famous only seven years later, after the death of Guevara in Bolivia. When Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli obtained the rights to publish Guevara’s ‘Bolivian Diary’, he published the image as a large poster. The iconic value of Che’s image increased out of proportion . The high contrast bust drawing thatis based on the photo was made in 1968 in several variations—some in red and black, others in black and white and some in black and white with a red star, by Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick, an artist most known for his depictions of Irish mythology. Che’s image first became familiar during the student revolts of May 1968 in Europeand the U.S.. In the 1970s, the same image was taken upby Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. Since the 1980’s every radical individual wore the image on a T-shirt, and is still going strong with various leftists,radical insurgent groups in south east Asia and Latin America swearing by Che’s book ‘Guerilla Warfare’. Jon Lee Anderson writes in‘Che Guevara: A revolutionary Life,’ “finding Che in his lens, Korda was stunned by the expressionon Che’s face. It was one of absolute implacability. Hesnapped and the image soon went around the world, eventually becomingthe famous poster thatwould adorn so manycollege bedrooms. In it, Che appeared as the ultimate revoultionary icon, his eyes staring boldly into the future, his expression wearing a virile embodiment ofoutrage against social injustice.” The Maryland Institute College of Art called Korda’s photo, “The most famous photograph in the world and a symbol of the 20th century.” UCLA art history professor David Kunzle has opined that there is no other figure in the twentieth century history that had produced such a vast and compelling imagery as Che Guevara, from coffee mugs, t-shirts, lighters to a placard used for any protest against any thing on the planet.
It is interesting to note the direction of Che’s gaze in theoriginal photograph, as Jim Fitzpatrick’s black and red version contains a small but significant modification. In the original, the eyes are focused on the area in front of Guevara, whilst in Jim Fitzpatrick’s modification, the eyes are gazing towards the distant horizon. There is an epic, heroic significance in Che’s pose; in the original image Che appears worried and tense, whilst in the interpretation his face is set in a pose of defiant pride, he appears to be looking towards the future. With asimple alteration the image of Che has come toovershadow the reality, and as such some criticise it as being nothing more than a mass-produced symbol. The painter who painted mythology made the image more heroic. The angle of the original photograph is crucial,like many other portraits of world leaders, this imagewas shot from a low angle against a light back ground,with the red star on the beret, long hair and shabby beard,a composition that gives Che a Christ-like quality. Equally important are the eyes, Che’s cold gaze into the void, looking beyond the Camera; this vision, despite manipulations by various pop artists, retains its passioneven on a t-shirt, beer mug or a cigarette lighter.
But why any other photographs of smiling or cigar smoking Che never appears? Because a smiling revolutionary is acontradiction to the term ‘revolutionary’, or it could bethat the society who consumes Che’s image does notwant to wear a smiling revolutionary, when theconsumer is flinging a stone at the riot police. In 2000,Korda sued Lowe Lintas Ltd., an advertisement agencyand Rex Features Ltd., a photo agency to the tune of $50,000/- for using Korda’s photo to promote Smirnoff Vodka. Korda’s lawsuit was not for financial reasons but,in his own words “…as a supporter of the ideals for which Che Guevara died, I am not averse to its reproduction by those who wish to propagate his memory and the cause of social justice throughout the world, but I am categorically against the exploitation of Che’s image for the promotion of products such as alcohol, or for any purpose that denigrates the reputationof Che.” British historian Robert Conquest, interprets the cult following of Che among the young (affluent or not) as “one of the unfortunate afflictions to which thehuman mind is prone to adolescent revolutionary romanticism.” American journalist and writer Lawrence Osborne, opines that “the image of Che was just so right for the time, Che was the revolutionary with a rock star status. Korda, as a fashion photographer, sensed that instinctively, and caught it. Before then, the Nazis were the only political movement to understand the power of glamour and sexual charisma, and exploit it. The Communists never got it. Then you have the Cuban revolution and into this void come these macho guys with their straggly hair and beards and big-dick glamour,and suddenly Norman Mailer and the entire radical chic crowd are creaming their jeans. Che had them in the palm of his hand, and he knew it. What he never knew, of course, was how much that image would define him.”
Even in India, Che and Mao are considered as the role models of the leftist Naxalite movement, spread across the tribal belts of Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Bengal and Madhya Pradesh. Among the personal belongs of slained Naxalites, there is always a copy of ‘Guerilla Warfare’, mostly in native tongue, and occasionally inEnglish. Che symbolises people who lived and died for their beliefs and ideology. Che is a legend, more in terms of Byron and Shelly than Marx and Lenin. Even Che’s captors and executioners knew that Che Guevara’s legend would not die with him. To leave the world in no doubt of his identity, his captors instructed some local nuns to wash his face and remove his bed raggled hair and beard, and then photographed his corpse. To their dismay, the image that was circulated throughout the world recalled countless Renaissance paintings of the crucified Christ taken down from the cross - and so Che attained iconic status for the second time. “The Christ like image prevailed,” writes Jorge Castañeda in Compañero “It’s as if the dead Guevara looks on his killers and forgives them, and upon the world, proclaiming that he who dies for an idea is beyond suffering.” This shows that oral heroic legend as a genre can spill over toother artistic genres and create myths. When Jean Paul Sartre commented, “Che was the most complete human being of our age”, this phrase added fuel to the May 1968 student upraisings. The eyes of Che Guevara staring outof t-shirts, mugs, posters and other paraphernalia, is still burning with impatience against social injustice, around the world, upon oppressed societies, as reminder to the oppressor. Today Che is also a mere product, a commercially viable revolutionary chic, in this globalized world. The heroic legend of Che is like the stories of a saviour who has been idolised, and whose ideals are seldom practiced.
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