Released directly to American home video in 1998, EL CHE: INVESTIGATING A LEGEND is a French-Spanish coproduction on the life and work of the Latin American revolutionary Ernesto Guevara, comprised of archival film and photos, and interviews with people who knew him. Superficial and
poorly made, this documentary sheds little new light on its subject.
In the early 1950s, Ernesto Guevara, son of a privileged Argentine family, left medical school and toured South America by motorcycle. The trip gave Guevara a sense of identity as a Latin American and politicized him through encounters with impoverished and exploited workers. After completing his
studies, Guevara went to Mexico City where he met another young man who sought revolutionary change: Fidel Castro. Guevara, now a committed Marxist, joined Castro in his effort to overthrow the corrupt Cuban government. Immediately after the 1959 Cuban revolution, Castro declared Guevara a citizen
of Cuba, and Guevara became Castro's chief assistant in setting up the new Cuban state. Policies they adopted aliened the United States but gained the support of the Soviet Union, just as Guevara's fierce dedication and principled approach to revolutionary change won him the support of Cuba's
people.
Speaking at an Algerian conference in 1965, however, Guevara criticized Soviet trade policies with Third World countries. His comments damaged his relationship with Castro, and soon after Guevara quietly left Cuba. After spending a short time in the Congo in a failed effort to assist a rebellion
there, Guevara went to Bolivia and endeavored to establish a revolutionary army that would sweep through Latin America. In October 1967, the Bolivian military, with American assistance, crushed Guevara's small guerrilla band, and Guevara himself was executed.
EL CHE: INVESTIGATING A LEGEND fails to do justice to its intriguing subject. Director Maurice Dugowson, primarily a fiction film director, takes a by-the-numbers approach to documentary filmmaking, relating Guevara's story by stringing together found imagery, intercutting it with interviews, and
overlaying it all with guiding narration. The archival material is EL CHE's best element. The film is abundant in images of Guevara throughout his life, from black-and-white home movies of his boyhood to Bolivian military footage of his shattered corpse. Unfortunately, Dugowson uses portentous,
unnecessary voice-over narration to supplement the imagery, such as (when referring to an early meeting between Guevara and Castro), "the pitfalls of power will give their relationship Shakespearean dimensions." Randomly selected library music on the soundtrack is another distraction. (Newsreel
footage of Batista's Cuba is accompanied by an instrumental of "Brazil.") The interviews are also problematic. The relationship of many of the interviewees (some of whom are identified exclusively by first name) to Guevara is only tenuously established, and comments are more often anecdotal than
informational.
As biography, EL CHE is clumsy. References to Guevara's personal life--his failed first marriage, his lifelong battle with asthma--seem dropped in arbitrarily. Finally, this film never makes clear why Guevara was so ardently embraced by American and European youth after his death. Those interested
in researching Guevara are advised to look elsewhere, for EL CHE: INVESTIGATING A LEGEND is hardly worth investigating.
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