Guevara-machine

This is taken from a Salon interview with Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez who directed a movie this year called Chevolution about the above iconic image of Che Guevara:

I’m kind of curious about all the man-on-the-street interviews with people wearing the Che T-shirts who have no idea who he is. I’m wondering about the process of finding those people. I’m guessing it wasn’t very hard to do.

Ziff: We went to gathering spots. At Venice Beach, we waited about five minutes for a Che T-shirt to come along. Maybe we were very lucky, but they happened pretty quickly in London, in different places. What happens is once you become sensitized to the image, you hate it, because you start seeing it everywhere. You realize our world is saturated by Che T-shirt wearers. So it wasn’t that difficult, but it was interesting the level of ignorance.

I would say it’s culturally specific, too. Because if you were to walk through the streets of Belfast or Dublin or Mexico City and you ask people “Who’s on your T-shirt?” they’d know. I think it’s quite culturally specific to the United States and to education in the United States and what people are taught and not taught in the States. It’s quite mind-boggling as a non-American.

On my way to New York for the festival, I sat next to a Tibetan monk on the plane and I was looking at some of the early reviews with the Che image on them. He leaned across and he said, “I see that man in so many countries, but not in my country, not in Tibet. Is he a musician?”

Do you think the image has lost or gained power in its explosion? Or both?

Ziff: I think both. It’s changed. It metamorphoses. It travels. It takes on new meanings. It gets attached to different moments. In Mexico City, you don’t really see that image without seeing the image of the Zapatistas, and it becomes an image about indigenous voices and the rights of the indigenous and independents. The schoolteachers strike in Oaxaca, it’s the same thing. It becomes this strong image of a struggle and specific in some contexts and in others this much more generic image used in protests we wouldn’t even associate with it, like green issues or whatever.

What are some of the strangest things you’ve seen the image on?

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Ziff: A doormat. Wipe your feet on Che Guevara!

Lopez: I just saw a “Che-r” T-shirt: Cher’s face with the beret.

Ziff: You see that a lot. People just put a black beret and a star on other people: Libera-Che, Che-ney. You can go on and on Googling them.