• 1 Steven Soderbergh, Interview with Geoff Andrew, The Guardian, February 13 2003.
• 2 Mark Gallagher, Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood (Austin (...)
• 3 Andrew deWaard and R. Colin Tait, The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: indie sex, corporate lies, and d (...)

1Hollywood film director Steven Soderbergh has carved for himself one of the most unusual niches in the contemporary film industry. An independent-minded risk taker, he is the creator of small, rare, often controversial films like sex, lies and videotape (1989), Kafka (1991), Schizopolis (1996), Full Frontal (2002), Bubble (2005), and The Girlfriend Experience (2009). He has also veered successfully into big, expensive, and star-studded films with potentially enormous commercial appeal, among them Out of Sight (1998), Ocean’s 11 (2001) and its sequels, Erin Brockovich (2000), The Good German (2006), The Informant! (2009), Contagion (2011) and the HBO biopic of showman Liberace, Behind the Candelabra (2013). After a period of relative art-house exile following the Sundance success of sex, lies and videotape, Soderbergh sought to find a place in more mainstream, commercial markets, but never quite shed his dedication to narrative and stylistic experimentation1. He has thus taken visible risks with unusual narrative forms (Full Frontal, Solaris, 2002), alternative forms of distribution (Bubble), and multiple image capture formats from 35mm to 16mm film, to pioneering the RED camera and experimenting with other digital systems2. Nevertheless, he has demonstrated great viability as a director of commercially successful and critically acclaimed films, gaining a level of independence and authorial control that is quite unique in the Hollywood film industry. To this date, he is only one of two directors -the other is Michael Curtiz- to be nominated in the same year twice in the best director Oscar category at the 2000 Academy Awards for Erin Brockovich and Traffic. He won the Oscar for Traffic3.

• 4 Manohla Dargis, Traffic DVD liner notes. The Criterion Collection. USA Films/Universal, 2002.
• 5 Aaron Baker, Steven Soderbergh. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011) 20; Peter Biskind, Dow (...)
• 6 Box Office Mojo: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=traffic.htm

4The year 2000 was a watershed year for director Steven Soderbergh: he completed two major feature films that were released within months of each other: the crowd-pleasing biopic Erin Brockovich (released March 17th) and the ensemble, non-linear, “social problem” film Traffic (limited released December 27th, wide on January 5th, 2001). Both films were major commercial hits, and both received numerous BAFTA, Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations. While Erin Brockovich won only one Oscar for Julia Roberts, Traffic won Oscars for best screenplay (Stephen Gaghan), best film editing (Stephen Mirrione), best supporting actor (Benicio Del Toro), and best director for Soderbergh. The film’s commercial success was a surprise, given the fact that “every studio in town turned it down”; as critic Manohla Dargis wrote “it was a film that Hollywood didn’t want to make”4. Eventually, the producing studio USA Films (a newly created feature film company of TV’s USA Network) took on the project, but had grave misgivings about its viability. The studio head, Barry Diller, expressed concerns that “a $50 million art film about drugs, with sequences in Spanish, and with so many actors you need a score card” would simply not find an audience5. But audiences and critics responded positively, and Traffic became that rare combination of a critical and awards-circle success that also appealed to a mass audience. It ultimately earned over US $207 million in box office receipts, with nearly two-thirds of that total coming in from the US and Canada alone6.

• 7 deWaard and Colin Tait, p. 160.
• 8 Anthony Kaufman, Steven Soderbergh Interviews. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002) p.  (...)

5The fears of studio executives weren’t all unfounded. Based on the 1989 UK Chanel 4 TV mini-series Traffik, created by Simon Moore, Soderbergh’s film interweaves the parallel story lines of two DEA agents on the track of a drug lord operating in the Tijuana-San Diego corridor between northern Mexico and southern California, the newly appointed, somewhat liberal US drug “czar” and his family (commuting between Washington DC and Cincinnati), and a pair of struggling policemen in Mexico trying, against all odds, to do the right thing. The movie counts no less than nineteen significant characters and 163 speaking parts (with emphasis on the drug czar – Michael Douglas – and one of the Mexican policemen -Benicio Del Toro), multiple locations in the US and Mexico, long segments spoken in Spanish, “documentary” style hand-held camera, and a generally non-linear narrative structure, potentially alienating to mainstream audiences7. Interested in the political and social implications of the plot – the futility of the US “war on drugs” – Soderbergh chose as his formal models two films with similar stylistic and social anxieties, specifically The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966), and Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969). Inspired by those films, Soderbergh wanted to recreate “that great feeling of things that are caught, instead of staged” accounting for much of the movie’s “documentary” and apparently accidental aesthetics8.

• 9 Steven Soderbergh, DVD commentary. The Criterion Collection. USA Films/Universal, 2002.
• 10 Steven Soderbergh, DVD commentary. The Criterion Collection. USA Films/Universal, 2002.

7In his commentary for the Universal Blu-ray edition of Traffic Soderbergh explained that his deliberate search for a distinctive look for the Mexico sequences was “crucial”. Most of the film was shot with standard Kodak 35mm stock with “no special processes or color timing” done to it9. However, for the Mexico sequences, Soderbergh added a tobacco filter to the camera lens, resulting in a hard yellow ochre hue, evocative of desert sunlight. The original footage was then de-saturated digitally in post-production in order to create the particularly color-less look that Soderbergh was seeking. A new camera negative was created from the already filtered, “yellowed” de-saturated new material, without color timing processing. That image was then duped into Ektachrome stock, to further enhance the grain. Finally, the Ektachrome dupe was made into an optical negative in Kodak 5272 stock, reversing the print’s emulsion on that negative, which was then incorporated into the original camera negative10. Thus, the “crucial” look of the Mexico sequences was only achieved through major photographic, technical, and digital manipulation, resulting in the washed out, grainy, and extremely de-saturated unnatural look seen in the final film. This “rarefying” effect resulted in an extreme contrast of temperature and texture with the other two major settings: the Cincinnati-Washington sequences featuring the drug czar, and the San Diego DEA-drug lord’s wife narrative line.

• 11 Stephen Holden, “Teeming mural of a war fought and lost”, The New York Times, December 27, 2000; Da (...)

8Traffic is a movie in which cultural, political and economic differences between Mexico and the US, between black, Hispanic and white, and between rich and poor are extremely important. Characters, setting and places are violently differentiated, and these differences are immediately evident to the spectator in the harsh contrasts of lighting, texture and temperature that are central to the movie’s design. The “look of Mexico” with its apparent color temperature ranging around 2400-2550 kelvin, is in fact the most distinctive in the movie, the one most consistently commented on, praised and criticized (for the rarifying effect) upon the movie’s release. Stephen Holden of the New York Times, for instance, referred to it as “acid-washed” while David Edelstein of Slate called it the look of “a bad trip”11. The stand out “look of Mexico” makes it quite different from, we would presume, some “normal” or standard appearance. Of the three major settings in Traffic the least seemingly altered is that of the San Diego settings, centered on the narrative line of the two DEA officers and the drug lord’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones). The ostensibly unobtrusive, though slightly filtered San Diego/La Jolla palette favors golden, softer, liquid textures (as opposed to the hard grain of Mexico). It was achieved by “flashing” the negative and adding diffusion filters, yielding pastel colors and significantly less grain, as if natural light itself was more benign in this affluent southern California heaven.

• 12 deWaard and Colin Tait, p. 147-150.

11Arguably, the Mexico and Ohio/Washington looks in the movie are equally disruptive of realist representation of locale or lighting; in short, the normal human eye does not see the world that way. These striking contrasts (Mexico/San Diego/Cincinnati) enforce the major conflict of the movie’s opposite spaces and characters. Paradoxically, while inspired by the “things are caught, not staged” aesthetics of films with a purported “documentary” style – the aforementioned The Battle of Algiers and Z – Soderbergh in fact achieves the opposite effect: Traffic’s design looks meddled with, interfered and manipulated for dramatic and stylistic purposes. As cinematographer, camera operator, and co-editor Soderbergh also incorporates a number of “accidental” visual and other oddities (extremely mobile hand-held camera, editing mishaps such as jump cuts and breaks in continuity, improvised dialogue, and real politicians and government agents playing themselves), all visual platitudes of the borrowed “documentary” style in fiction films. Nonetheless, the most plausibly “realist” representation is that of San Diego, while Cincinnati and Mexico emerge as dissonantly mediated and artificial. Intriguingly, San Diego is treated as a “bridge”, a visual bridge in the movie – as it is in real life – between two seemingly “unnatural” worlds in the drug trade: the Mexican cartels and the US Government. These two, as argued above, range the opposite spectrum of color temperatures between the desolate, suffocating world of drug traffickers, and the cold and lifeless career politicians “at war” against the drug trade. It is a cold, lifeless, and futile war being fought in Washington’s corridors of power, while the trade in the border remains largely intact. The visual variations are important for Soderbergh’s message, and consistent with later experiments in his “Global Social Problem” films Contagion and The Informant12.

• 13 Steven Soderbergh interview with Stephen Lemons, Salon.com, December 20, 2000.

12A similar argument can be made of Soderbergh’s insistence, despite studio pressure, of letting his Latino actors speak Spanish in all the Mexico sequences. He was concerned that the movie would have “no integrity” if they spoke English. In an interview with Salon contributor Stephen Lemons, Soderbergh declared that this strategy was essential to the film’s attention to the topic of “the impenetrability of another culture”. And while the language barrier was indispensable to creating that “impenetrability” and difference on an aural and linguistic level, the visual and cinematographic choices of the Mexico-Cincinnati divide, and the San Diego “bridge” were arguably even more effective in underscoring those differences – cultural and political as well – on a textural, tangible, corporeal level. Said Soderbergh to Lemons, “Those three places felt very different to me. My impressions from Mexico were different from (San Diego) California, and different from Ohio in the winter13”.

• 14 Box Office Mojo: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=che.htm
• 15 The Cannes Film Festival screening reviews appeared as noted, May 22nd, 2008.
• 16 “Angry protests at Che Premiere”, Reuters, December 6, 2008. Cited in Wikipedia, Che page.
• 17 Chris Sullivan, The Independent (London), December 12, 2008.

14Difficult and long, with more than 90% of its dialogue spoken in Spanish, Che Parts I and II epically represent and recreate, respectively, the Argentine physician Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s recruitment, rise to leadership, and triumphs in the Cuban Revolution from 1956 to 1959, and his failed campaign, capture and death in Bolivia in 1966 and 1967. Juxtaposed to these narrative frames in Part I is Che Guevara’s public relations trip to New York City, his famous speech at the United Nations General Assembly on December 11th, 1964, and his appearance on the CBS political interview show Face the Nation during the same tour. Unlike Traffic, which found some comparable difficulties in getting funding, and skepticism from producers about its Spanish language segments, yet generated favorable reviews and enormous box office receipts, Che reception was decidedly mixed. At an estimated budget of some US $58 million, the domestic US-Canada combined grosses were less than US $1.5 million, with international sales estimated around US $41 million14. After its Cannes premiere of May 21st, 2008, critics’ reactions were mostly mixed. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called it “a flawed masterpiece: enthralling but structurally fractured”; Stephen Garret of Esquire found it “defiantly pious and boring”, while Richard Corliss of Time magazine named it “stiff and forbidding” and declared it “the woodsiest war movie ever”15. After its New York Film Festival show the reaction of the US press was similarly lukewarm, and the movie was met by “angry protests” from Cuban exiles when it showed in Miami, in an invitation-only event, in December of 200816. The film was, predictably, better received at the Latin American Film Festival in Havana, Cuba, where Benicio Del Toro was reportedly presented with a 10-minute standing ovation17. After uneven distribution abroad and very limited release domestically, Che only won a few international film festival awards and those were mostly given to Del Toro for his performance. In the end, Che failed to make a “revolution” with critics or the box office and Traffic remains, to date, Soderbergh’s most profitable and most critically acclaimed prestige film. Visually, though, its pattern reconnects and revises many of the motifs that Soderbergh had perfected in Traffic.

• 18 Wired Magazine, no. 16.09, August 18, 2008.

16According to Soderbergh’s press and publicity releases, the differences in design were to show the two different approaches, and the two different outcomes, of Che’s Latin American revolutionary campaigns. Though both parts were filmed using the RED One camera (which was then in its prototype phase18) there are visible differences in picture definition, color, tones, temperatures, camera mobility, shot size, chronology, and even aspect ratios (1.85:1 and 1.78:1 respectively). Each part does sustain a consistent visual style through most of its own narrative, with significant variations in two important segments: Che’s New York tour of late 1964, and the fatal “Yuro ravine” detour that eventually lead to Che’s capture, detainment, and execution in Bolivia. Surprisingly, these effects create both uniformity and variations of style and technique that arguably underscore the film(s) narrative meaning: the vastly different contexts and outcomes of these two revolutionary exploits.

• 19 Michèle Ray, “The Execution of Che by the CIA”, Ramparts Magazine, March 5, 1968, p. 23-37.

20The subjective turn in camera style is further emphasized, and goes even farther in the scene when Che is shot to death by Bolivian army sergeant Mario Terán, who fired nine rounds at Guevara in two bursts of gun fire with his M2 carbine19. In an unusual, in fact unique formal decision, Soderbergh filmed Che’s execution in a visible “point of view” shot; not the typical approximation to the “angle of vision” of the character, but rather from an actual “POV” perspective. The camera is in a low angle, as Che was sitting on the hut’s floor; it looks directly at the assassin as he fires, and then wobbles and topples to its side, landing on the floor in a lopsided Dutch angle. This literal photographic point of view is the most distinctive shot in the movie, precisely because it adopts a level of subjectivity unseen in the movie heretofore and, this once only, puts the spectator directly behind Che’s own eyes. Paradoxically, some of the criticism of the movie at the time of its release concerned how Che was made less a “live” character and more an icon, a symbol, or as Stephen Garret had judged in his Esquire review cited above, “uncomplex, pure of heart, defiantly pious and boring”. Thus, the dramatic and unusual choice of Che’s point of view at the moment of death is made all the more significant. If, up to this point, Soderbergh had sought to avoid open judgment of Che’s personality, instead portraying him directly as an unflinchingly committed revolutionary, the death sequence and the actual ending of the movie suggest differently. After the death scene, the movie flashes back momentarily to Mexico City, June 1955, to the first meeting of Che and Fidel Castro. The meeting of Che and Fidel comes near the opening of Part I, and its reintroduction at the end of Part II makes it then all the more conspicuous. In the flashback, Soderbergh shows a moment missing from Part I, in which Che agrees to accompany Castro and his men to fight in Cuba, but only if Castro consents to let Che go, “after we win”, to make the revolution elsewhere. The two shake hands in agreement. Yet a final flashback shows Che in the Granma, the yacht that took Fidel’s men from Mexico to Cuba in November of 1956. Che observes Fidel and Raúl Castro conversing, a pensive look in his face, before the shot fades to black. These two final flashbacks also constitute a unique practice in the entire structure of the two films, which, unlike Traffic, and with the sole exception of the New York sequences, typically maintain recognizably linear narratives. It is as if Soderbergh is purposely breaking his own established narrative pattern to remind the spectator how this all began: with a man making a personal decision to become involved in a cause that was not his to begin with, a truly selfless revolutionary. In other words, the combination of the subjective camera, the point of view death scene, and the flashbacks that return to us a live Che at the end of the film, arguably show Soderbergh’s intimacy with the character; he shows us that this Che is alive, and that he is “our” Che.

• 20 Ben Kenignsberg, “Guerrillas in the Mist: Steven Soderbergh makes his boldest film yet”, Time Out C (...)

21In fact, there is more evidence of Soderbergh’s quiet attempt to show us a rather sympathetic Che. Nothing is said in the movie of the fact that Che left his first wife and daughter in Mexico when he joined Castro’s troops. In 1966, he reportedly spent six months in hiding in Dar es Salaam and Prague, while his wife and four children were still in Cuba. And while his second wife, Aleida March, and their children are briefly seen in Part II before Che’s departure for the fatal Bolivia campaign, nothing is further said about them after Che’s death. Like the purposeful sidestepping of Che’s failed Congo expedition, the refusal to confront how Che’s decisions affected his family can also be interpreted as Soderbergh and Del Toro’s insistence on a favorable portrait of the man. Critics noted that, after the Cannes premiere, Soderbergh made several changes to the final cut of the film that was eventually released internationally. In his review for Time Out Chicago critic Ben Kenigsberg observed that the movie “neither condemns nor elevates Che”, but also lamented the removal, after the Cannes premiere, of a sequence depicting Che presiding over the trial and demotion of revolutionary Lalo Sardiñas. Kenigsberg considered this late editing decision flawed, in part because the sequence provided “a key hint at the darker side of Che’s ideology”, and because it suggested Che’s subsequent “brutal human-rights abuses in Castro’s government20”. Another scene depicting Che presiding over the trial and execution of two deserters was left intact in the finished film, though. In that case however, the men in question had gone on to terrorize, pillage and rape in nearby peasant villages, and so the movie suggests that their fate was justified. Yet these conspicuous omissions – Congo, family, violence, human rights abuses – can be interpreted as evidence of Soderbergh’s “softening” and arguably of his design, despite claims to the contrary, to show a sympathetic portrait of the controversial man. Nonetheless, the 3rd act anchoring of the movie’s moral and human drama strictly from Che’s perspective is arguably the boldest decision, in that it makes Che no longer the object of the narrative, but rather its “speaking subject”. Che becomes the “I” of Soderbergh’s camera, something that the non-linear and multi-protagonist structure of Traffic could simply not do.

• 21 Alex Von Tunzelman, The Motorcycle Diaries: Che’s clean getaway, The Guardian (London), April 14, 2 (...)

23The same is true of the figure of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. From the 1968 Spanish film El Che Guevara, where he was played by Francisco Rabal, to the 1969 disastrous biopic Che!, with Omar Sharif in the title role; from Antonio Banderas in Evita (1996), to Gael García Bernal, who played “Che” in two consecutive films: Fidel (2002), and Diarios de motocicleta (2004), Che Guevara has cast a long, dark shadow over the actors who have portrayed him. While Benicio Del Toro may have come the closest to a physical resemblance, Gael García Bernal’s sympathetic, romantic portrayal of the youthful Guevara – before he was, in fact, nicknamed “Che” by his Cuban friends – has probably had the most lasting impression with contemporary audiences21. As a producer-director team, Del Toro and Soderbergh purposely tried to reach for a new degree of realism in representing Che Guevara.

• 22 Gavin Smith, “Hired Gun: Steven Soderbergh-Interview”, Film Comment, 37.1, January 2001, p. 26-31.

24Soderbergh has often declared his preference for a cinematic style that steers clear from overtly visible intercessions of the cinematic apparatus. In January 2001, on the occasion of the wide release of Traffic, he told Gavin Smith of Film Comment that he sought to speak directly to his audience. “[T]he more real it feels” – said Soderbergh – “and the less it feels like a Hollywood movie, the more audiences will connect with it22”. His professed search for “objective realism” is based on circumventions of the classical realist style and the adoption of certain tropes of documentary aesthetics that are, paradoxically, dictated by the presence of the technical apparatus. To wit, photographic manipulation, hand-held cameras, lifelike use of sound, and the use of “natural” lighting are devices often perceived to render realism, while at the same time they are deeply self-reflexive practices. And while Traffic could be classified under the tenuous category of the “docudrama” in style and themes, Che would most logically be labeled under the flag of the historical biopic. Nevertheless, these are both films that aspire, even if superficially, to achieve some semblance of “realism”.

• 23 Native Spanish speakers, however, cannot ignore the errors in dialects and accents from actors play (...)
• 24 Quoted by Dennis Lim, “Screenwriting Drafts of History”, The New York Times. January 1, 2009.

25Yet, in both movies the Latin American settings are inevitably cloaked in some sense of “otherness” of “difference” – the elusiveness that has marred representations of Latin America from Eisenstein to the tropical romances of the classical era, and into contemporary cinema. As argued above, in Traffic, Mexico and the Washington and Cincinnati settings are visual and linguistic opposites, yet both emerge as equally “unreal” in terms of representation. The semblance of realism comes from the appearance that these sequences are spontaneous; as if the photographer had neglected to put in correcting lenses. Yet Che “corrects” those imperfections with the adoption of a photographically more realist style. There is no “otherness” to the majority of the Latin American settings in Che, and no forced “otherness” to the linguistic barrier23. The whole thing was designed, said screenwriter Peter Buchman, as if “we were looking over their shoulders24”. By contrast, the only truly photographic “other” in Che is the US, the UN, and the non-linear 1964 segments. And ultimately, by adopting an overtly conspicuous “subjective” camera style for the third act of Che, Part II, and assuming Guevara’s “point-of-view” Soderbergh effectively reverses that strange gaze: it is Che – and by proxy, Latin America – who is doing the looking. But the “subjective” camera always puts in evidence the presence of the cinematic apparatus, so Che remains mediated. Steven Soderbergh’s shifts in style and perspective in his Latin American-themed movies arguably demonstrate the director’s daring risk-taking in order to merge style, content, and meaning, and to render a closer look that arguably aspires to the purging of “otherness” from representation. Yet, like the freeze frame close-up of Che’s dead face at the end of Solanas and Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces, Pt. I (1968), Che remains inscrutable, and Latin America itself elusive for “Western” representation.