The future's past: re-imaging the Cuban revolution

Afterimage, March-April, 1999 by Jeffrey Skoller

El Dia deals with the fascination that this photograph still holds as a central image in modern Latin American history. The film is a work of mourning in the form of an investigative elegy, not just an attempt to raise an image of the dead, but also as a way of working through the memory of a period of history that has just past. The film is structured around a range of materials: Katz's footage shot in the mountains in present-day Bolivia, talking head interviews, newspaper dippings, archival photographs and films as well as a reading of a poem by Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges. Katz explores this image of the dead Guevara not only as a symbolic icon, but more importantly as a document of a moment that took place in real time and in a specific place. The film becomes an investigative report on how this photograph came to exist and closely examines it as a document of brutality in the Latin American past. Katz relentlessly reexamines this photograph using extreme closeups and croppings of the original image. In addition he visits the site in Vallegrande, Bolivia where Guevara's body was exhibited, exploring with his own camera the room where the famous photograph was taken and the landscape surrounding it. For the exiled Katz, the central action in the film is one of obsessive return. Katz keeps returning to the photograph of Guevara, to Latin America and to the site where the photograph was taken and to the lost promise of revolution that marked his youth.

Eric L. Santner defines the work of mourning as "a process of elaborating and integrating the reality of loss or traumatic shock by remembering and repeating it in symbolically and dialogically mediated doses; it is a process of translating, troping and figuring loss . . ."(4) Throughout the film, Katz shows us this famous photograph over and over again through different discourses, trying to understand the continuing mythic power of Guevara and the photograph. He begins by tracing the image to its origins. Originally published as a UPI wire photo credited to the photographer Hal Moore, Katz discovers that the photograph was actually taken by a young Bolivian photographer, Freddie Alborta. He travels to Bolivia to talk to Alborta about taking the picture. In a series of highly moving descriptions, Alborta describes himself in 1967 as a young freelance photographer who was flown with a group of 24 journalists and photographers by the Bolivian military to Vallegrande where a press conference was held to report the capture of Guevara and to display his corpse to prove it. Cutting between images of present-day Vallegrande and Alborta's interview, Katz asks pointed and detailed questions about Alborta's experience. Now in his sixties, Alborta is a soft-spoken and elegant man shown recalling this central moment in his life in which the forces of history called on him to be part of a defining and crucial moment of Latin American history, and he remembers everything. He describes how the journalists were taken to a small laundry room near a hospital in which Guevara's body was laid out on a sink. Alborta remembers the smell of rotting flesh. Despite the intensity of the moment, Alborta immediately understood the mythological dimensions of Guevara's body. When asked how he felt when he saw the body, Alborta explains: