On the road to revolution - the ‘back story’ to Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara

GalleryFilm are screening Motorcycle Diaries (Los Diarios de Motocicleta) directed by Walter Salles on Monday 27th September. A road movie to equal Easy Rider, Motorcycle Diaries gives us the ‘back story’ to Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara starring Gael Garcia Bernal as Che and Rodrigo De La Serna as his friend Alberto Granado.

*Make a date in your diary for Monday 27th September 7.15 for 7.45pm in the Linbury Room, Dulwich Picture Gallery

* Free wine and canapes donated by Herne Hill’s Number 22 Restaurant

*Free raffle prize – ‘Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life’ donated by Herne Hill Books

Philip French wrote in The Observer in 2004:

“When he was murdered in Bolivia in October 1967 by the local army in association with the CIA, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara immediately took his place alongside Bolivar, Pancho Villa and other heroic Latin American revolutionaries. Comparable in popular appeal to Jack Kennedy, he immediately became for young people what TE Lawrence and Leon Trotsky had been for their parents, the contemporary model of the intellectual as man of action….The tough, ruthless, ideologically driven Guevara, though still an icon of sorts through the ubiquity of the Alberto Korda photograph, is no longer the hero he once was….

In fact, the Che that is offered us in Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries is a diffident charmer, and the film is set in 1952, two years before he completed his medical studies, left his native Argentina for good, saw the CIA overthrow a democratic government in Guatemala, crossed into Mexico a confirmed revolutionary and met Fidel Castro.

The Motorcycle Diaries is an account of a journey of social exploration and self-discovery undertaken by two men and based on books they wrote. The first is the 23-year-old Ernesto Guevara (Gael García Bernal) before he was nicknamed ‘Che’, the much loved son of a well-heeled middle-class family of Irish and Spanish descent living in Buenos Aires. The second is a family friend, the 29-year-old biochemist Alberto Granado (Rodrigo De la Serna). They set out on a decrepit 1939 Norton motorbike to travel 8,000 kilometres (nearly 5,000 miles) in five months and see the vast continent on which they live. The trek will take them across the Andes into Chile, through the Atacama Desert to Peru and, after a sojourn at a leper colony on the Amazon, they’ll end up in Venezuela. They called their vehicle ‘La Poderosa’ (‘The Mighty One’) but it soon lets them down. Anticipating numerous spills to come, they nearly crash into a bus within sight of Guevara’s waving family.

In some ways the movie resembles Easy Rider, a picture made when Che’s posthumous reputation was at its height, but it’s altogether more cheerful, optimistic, benevolent, and Ernesto and Alberto are far more likeable and idealistic than the fashionable heroes of Dennis Hopper’s movie.”