“My Mind Wants Freedom”: Horacio Vallereggio’s ¡UF!

Fourth post by our Summer 2015 Writer in Residence Federico Windhausen

How to characterize ¡UF!? Begun in 1973, finished the following year, and originally lasting approximately three hours, Horacio Vallereggio’s Super 8 film includes a cast of thousands (a count considerably boosted by its mass-rally footage) and enough conflicted sex, eruptions of violence, groovy pot parties, hysterical freak-outs, and snatches of period-specific music to qualify it for the distinguished label of “underground epic.”

While it shares with other entries in the category, Star Spangled to Death (1956-2004) and Chelsea Girls (1966) in particular, an episodic structure, an assortment of performance styles, and an overabundance of psychological agitation, ¡UF! is in many ways sui generis, a subcultural artefact shaped by a unique hybrid of Argentine pop and politics. Vallereggio’s friend and fellow filmmaker, the late Juan Villola, was certainly right to call the film “a scream in images and sound,” made “to banish the pain and one’s own ghosts,” but its emotional makeup is also multifaceted, as suggested by the interjection that makes up its title: “uf” denotes “tiredness, annoyance, or suffocation” in Argentine slang.[1] “Uf” can be funny as well, especially with the right inflection, and there is much humor amidst the delirium and angst depicted in Vallereggio’s film.

Before delving deeper into ¡UF!, a bit of background information on the work of this little-known filmmaker is necessary. Coming out of a fine arts conservatory training, where he began a painting practice he continues to this day, Vallereggio first made films with his friends in the late 1960s, working in 8mm and Super 8. Between 1968 and 1977 (from his early twenties to his early thirties) he made approximately thirteen shorts and two feature-length films in Argentina.[2] His short films place his performers front and center – as in the cinema of Marie Louise Alemann, but with a broader range of performative and theatrical modes than her films tend to display. His visual style occasionally explores the long take (a key device in the comic self-portrait Corto Muy Corto [Very Short Short, 1973] and the mood piece for melancholy romantics titled Triste triste… [Sad sad…, 1976]), but more often it is dominated by highly fragmented montage sequences offering a variety of visual perspectives on each filmed performance. In ¿Y esta loca quién es? (And Who Is This Crazy One?, 1970), for example, the actress Liliana Canteros offers a sketch of an eccentric character whose facial expressions and physical gestures the filmmaker presents through a disjunctive accumulation of still and moving images. Complementing the film’s visual array are sounds of humming, guttural noises, and nonsensical vocalizations, all common within his work. His interest in actresses can also be seen in films such as La diosa de la banana (The Banana Goddess, 1976), which showcases voluptuous, heavily made-up, and exceedingly histrionic female performers not far from the types celebrated by George Kuchar, but existing in the Argentine context in a playful and at times ironic relation to traditions such as the “grotesco criollo,” a local, vernacular form of the performative grotesque rooted in the theater.[3] Throughout his cinema Vallereggio seeks to heighten our sense of the presence of the performer, perhaps most conspicuously in a pair of films about carnality and eroticism, Sonrisa del más acá (Smile of the One Nearest, 1975) and Los placeres de la carne (The Pleasures of the Flesh, 1977). In both films, a musical approach to editing builds up to ecstatic sequences of bodies distorted by curved mirrors.
 

There is a lightness of tone in Vallereggio’s shorts that also pervades certain scenes in his two longer films, La cabellera de Berenice (The Lock of Berenice, 1972) and ¡UF!. An important differentiating feature in both of those films, however, is the overall tonal disjunctiveness that they share, most palpably sensed when a comic scene gives way to one of dark intensity. Shot in regular 8mm, La cabellera de Berenice begins with a close-up of the cover of the artist Margarita Paksa’s LP Comunicaciones, along with a strong aural presence: an excerpt of a spoken-word track, presenting what Paksa conceived of as an “obsessive description” of a blandly neutral environment, combined with a high-pitched, repetitive electronic composition by John Eaton.[4] A group of young men and women, not all of whom are fully dressed, sit somberly in a circle, first staring at the LP cover and soon beginning to move together and individually in apparently improvised movements. After about three minutes of the film’s hypnotically monotonous opening, the performers are shown making percussive noises with their bodies or objects at close reach. The space of activity, which they inhabit and act upon, lies somewhere between performance workshop and mental asylum. During the course of film, the recitation of fragments from Jacques Prévert’s poem “Tentative de description d’un dîner de têtes à Paris-France” (Attempt to Describe a Dinner of Heads in Paris, France) functions as a counter-cultural declaration, singling out in a litany the bourgeois subjects who merit contempt and derision (“those who die of boredom on Sunday afternoons because they see Monday arriving and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday and Sunday afternoon”). For Vallereggio, an artistic practice reliant upon communal exchange seems to have represented a viable mode of resistance to social and cultural repression (not to mention the tedium of bourgeois existence). In addition, one way that the finished film – the product of his involvement with collective practices – could embody certain principles of freedom was by refusing the imperative to be seamless or well-polished, or to have been tidily stripped of excess. [5]
 

Most of La cabellera de Berenice and many scenes in ¡UF! were filmed in the large house where Vallereggio was able to create his own alternative micro-community of bohemian artists for a time during the 1970s.[6] Of the two films, ¡UF! is the less insular work. It was shot not only at that house but in various other locations as well, including the elementary school where Vallereggio taught students from the shantytown known as Villa 31 and the streets of Buenos Aires during the consequential May Day rally of 1974. The full version of the film has not been available for decades, having been cut up by Villola for a “homage” of clips and lost after Villola’s unexpected death. What remains runs a little less than hour but contains enough footage to convey a sense of what Vallereggio had originally assembled. I offer here a rough outline of the first half of what remains of ¡UF!, with particular attention paid to the dense web of intertextual references that Vallereggio incorporates onto the film’s soundtrack:

• The opening scene begins in medias res, after the lights have been turned on at a film screening and during an argument between attendees, some of whom are meant to represent affronted viewers and others who act as the offending experimental filmmakers. The scene is a humorous take on the arguments that would ensue when experimental films would be shown at local Super 8 open-screening events in Buenos Aires.

• To documentary footage of his young students Vallereggio overlays spoken excerpts from Jules Celma’s invective-filled memoir and tract Le Journal d’un éducastreur (Diary of an Edu-castrator).[7] Inspired in part by the events of May 1968 in Paris, Celma renounced aspects of his authority as a teacher and noted the various ways in which childhood sexuality manifested itself in the classroom. His controversial account of his “experiment” includes extensive attacks against the structures of power to which the educational system contributes; demonstrating his predilection for the poetic litany, Vallereggio quotes from passages such as this one: “Based in humiliation, repression, the leveling out of everyone to uniform beings, identical in their artificial desires, identical in their neuroses, in their behaviors, in their reactions, Education appears as one of the best pillars of our societies, one of the best guarantees of Power.”[8]

• Briefly inserted into and following the school sequence is footage of Argentines chanting President Juan Perón’s name in the streets on May 1, 1974. Later in the film Vallereggio shows the large rally in the Plaza de Mayo where the Montoneros guerrilla group and its partisans were cast out by Perón, marking a decisive moment for radical, militant leftism in the country. Although the film takes no clear position with regard to such events, Vallereggio’s insertions and juxtapositions nonetheless serve to place internal, psychological struggles on a continuum with external instability and political violence.

• A subsequent sequence introduces Vallereggio’s main performers as they sit in a pot circle and link hands. “Us and Them,” a song by Pink Floyd (a band used so often in shorts of the era that Narcisa Hirsch recalls a friend labeling them “Super 8 music”) is heard on the soundtrack.

• The first of a number of sex scenes, this one heterosexual, is followed by more rally shots, set (perhaps ironically) to the Chilean hippie anthem “Marcha Al Interior del Espiritu” (March to the Interior of the Spirit) by Los Jaivas, whose only lyrics are “Let us be friends / Let us be brothers.” Another sex scene, between two men, is accompanied by excerpts from the rock band Aquelarre’s “Cruzando La Calle” (Crossing the Street): “America vibrates, my mind wants freedom / Death surrounds you, death wants to win against us / Crossing the street, crossing the door of your home / your brother is dying, my brother won’t be able to wait.”[9]

• A series of intense scenes follows: Two characters undergo LSD treatment under the watch of their psychoanalysts (a practice to which Vallereggio and his friends had assented with their own therapists), causing extreme emotional reactions. A woman is raped by two men, and the depiction of its immediate aftermath, as she faces her male lover and a concerned female friend, is intercut with a lyrical sex scene. We also hear the first of the film’s excerpts from Jorge López Ruiz’s banned 1971 album Bronca Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires Ire). Combining free jazz and orchestral compositions with the poetry of José Tcherkaski, Bronca Buenos Aires was a reaction to a 1969 military crackdown on protesters in Córdoba known as “El Cordobazo.” By the end of the film, as its performers seek to leave Buenos Aires by car, Vallereggio inserts lines from the record’s darkest movement: “Fears invaded the city / There were melancholies and nostalgias / and they became accustomed like accomplices.”

The rest of ¡UF! includes vampires on the prowl, comedy sketches involving Lady Justice and the clergy, spinning-camera dance sequences, the eating of raw meat, snippets of both the classic tango “Se dice de mí” and Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” and much more.
 

In a 1978 article co-written with Canteros, Vallereggio argued that the experimental film confronts the viewer with questions of identity: “Who is the spectator beneath his skin, behind his occupation, the routine, beyond the books that were learned or the way in which he lives[?]” Just as that question has no single, unchanging, definitive answer, for Vallereggio an experimental film “is an open work, recomposed many times, as many as its viewings.”[10] There is an unintended irony to this formulation, given that Vallereggio’s own film would later be disassembled, only surviving in a permanently fragmented form. Yet it also seems to be the case that his tendency to foreground fragmentation and avoid the illusion of a synthetic unity helped to make ¡UF! into a film not easily destroyed. It is a major work of Latin American experimental cinema that currently exists as a richly layered ruin.
Parenthetically, I should add that most of the stills I am presenting with this text are taken from poor transfers (from VHS to DVD) of Vallereggio’s Super 8 and 8mm films. Not surprisingly, given the state of so many Argentine experimental films from the era, his originals are in need of preservation. Currently, no institution or organization in Argentina (or elsewhere) is taking the initiative to combine two essential undertakings: the repair, maintenance, and stewardship of this aspect of the country’s cinematic heritage, and the creation of a viable distribution system for work that remains so little-seen.