Che: Part Two · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man crouches over a shortwave set in dry brush and works it, and nothing comes back. Havana is out there somewhere and does not answer. That radio is the whole film in one prop: good equipment, trained hands, no one on the other end. Soderbergh spends two hours on things failing to connect, and Che: Part Two is one of the few films that builds an entire style out of the failure.

His invention is structural, and it is easy to miss because it lives across two films rather than inside one. He made the Cuban campaign and the Bolivian campaign as a matched pair, changed one variable, and shot the second panel to refute the first. Part One is 2.35:1: open country, columns moving through it, a frame with room for a movement to grow inside it. Part Two is 1.85:1. The narrower frame boxes Guevara against rock and vegetation, denies him the heroic middle distance, and keeps losing him among interchangeable men in olive drab. Same commander, same method, different ground. The aspect ratio is the instrument that measures the difference.

Deleuze had a name for the contract Part One honors. He called it the movement-image: someone perceives a situation and acts, and the action changes the situation. Its grandest version is the large form of the action-image, where an encompassing world presses on a man until he performs the one act that transforms it. Santa Clara is that. Bolivia is what happens when the circuit is cut. Che still perceives with complete accuracy — the Bolivian Diary the film adapts is the record of a man who misses nothing — and none of it converts into an act that lands. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image: a character who can no longer respond adequately to what he sees.

This is where the concept earns its keep, because the standard complaint about the film is that it is inert. It is. The question is whether the inertness is a failure of drama or the subject of it. Watch how the firefights are built. They begin without warning, are hard to read while they happen, and stop. Nothing crescendos. There is no montage of accumulating victories because nothing accumulates, and the only rising action is a falling number: the onscreen titles counting the surviving column down.

Those titles are worth pausing on. Dates, place names, arithmetic. Deleuze's word for an image that stops being something you follow and becomes something you read is the lectosign, and Soderbergh gets there by importing the diary's form wholesale. Entries, not chapters. The move is inherited: The Hour of the Furnaces had already made hard text panels load-bearing structure rather than decoration, and Che takes the lesson that a caption can state what a scene would have to fake.

What fills the space where action used to be is looking and listening. Deleuze's term for those stretches is the pure optical and sound situation: a character, and with him the audience, can only register. Long lenses press the guerrillas flat into the scrub. Wide shots hold them small and unemphatic. Where a war film supplies coverage that clarifies, this one supplies geography that confuses, because the column is lost and the camera declines to know more than the column does. The ground stops being a setting for action and becomes what Deleuze called an any-space-whatever, a space that has lost its connective coordinates. Iglesias's score nearly withdraws. For long stretches there is insect noise, wind through dry brush, the friction of movement, and shortwave static doing the work a score would otherwise do.

The debts are traceable and specific. Bazin argued that the long take and the deep frame leave an event's ambiguity intact and hand the interpreting to the viewer; Soderbergh applies that to a firefight. Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers supplied the grammar: telephoto coverage, newsreel grain, a structure organized around cells and curfews and supply instead of set-pieces. Rossellini's The Rise to Power of Louis XIV supplied the pedagogical flatness, whole procedures held in undramatized takes with reaction-shot psychology refused. Watkins' Culloden invented the protocol of putting a jostled reportage camera inside a battle no camera could have covered. And the ICAIC method of Memories of Underdevelopment, splicing real broadcast material into fiction until the two textures stop being distinguishable, is where the radio layer comes from. Burn! is the template for the rest: a star embedded inside a lecture on revolution as an exportable technology, insurrection filmed as engineering and cost accounting.

Then there is del Toro, doing the hardest thing an actor can be asked to do, which is subtract. Asthma, dysentery, injury, hunger, the dependence on other men to get him across ground he can no longer manage. The film presents physical ruin as information rather than pathos. Deleuze called this a cinema of the body: instead of a body expressing a soul, a body that carries duration in its tiredness and its waiting. One thing del Toro keeps to the end. The authority persists as habit after the conditions that produced it are gone; he still commands. That gap between the posture and the power behind it is what Deleuze called the gest, an attitude that stops looking natural and exposes the social relation propping it up.

The film's deepest political nerve runs through a different concept. Eisenstein could cut a crowd into a single body because he assumed a people was already there and the film only had to reveal it. Deleuze's observation about modern political cinema is that the assumption collapses: the people are missing, and the film must work in their absence. Foquismo, the theory Guevara carried into Bolivia, held that a small armed nucleus could produce revolutionary conditions rather than wait for them. It held, in effect, that the vanguard would produce a people. Part Two films the not-producing. Monje's party will not back the column. The campesinos will not join and inform instead. The encounters fail as communication before they fail as politics, since the fighters cannot speak the languages of the people they came to liberate. Soderbergh stages the Bolivian Rangers being trained by American advisers with exactly the neutrality he gives the guerrillas' own drilling: two systems of preparation, one of which is being resupplied. No editorial. The arithmetic does it.

It should be said plainly that the film's silence about 1959 to 1965, the ministry and the tribunals and the Congo, is the choice most responsible for the charge that it lets the myth stand by never examining what Guevara did in power. That objection is fair, and no formal argument answers it.

Then the last cut, the only overtly rhetorical gesture Soderbergh permits himself. After the schoolhouse at La Higuera, the film returns to the sea and the Granma, the 1956 crossing that began everything. It is not a memory; the man who would have had it is dead. The film simply steps out of the chronological line it held for two hours and re-enters an earlier region of the past — what Deleuze, after Bergson, described as sheets of past, where beginning and end coexist instead of succeeding each other. Circularity, not apotheosis. Whether that is consolation or the coldest observation in the film, that the beginning is now the only place the myth can still live, stays genuinely open.

What it did to the art: it proved a defeat can be filmed as process, with no recognition scene and no martyr's glow, at four hours, in Spanish, with the most reproduced photograph of the twentieth century deliberately withheld. It proved it on a camera small enough to carry into foliage, one of the first major features originated on the RED One, with one man shooting and cutting it. Assayas's Carlos followed with the same long-form, multilingual, procedural shape. The decade's biographical films increasingly declined biography. The roadshow-plus-video-on-demand release now reads as a rehearsal for the five-hour object that streaming made ordinary.

Watch it again for the edges of the frame and the numbers in the titles, and listen for where the score refuses to go. The silence around the execution is the loudest choice in the film.