Limite

While most people seem to love or hate this film, I have mixed feelings. It is a beautiful, slow-paced film, about emotion rather than actions or events. Limite is full of beautiful black and white film images that are beautiful to look at, as long as one is willing to just sit back and enjoy the scenery. Eventually however, the scenery becomes too repetitious. I think a more experienced filmmaker would have edited the film down a bit, but instead every artistic shot was kept.

The scenario (plot is too strong a word) involves three people adrift in a rowboat. The three have each cut themselves off from the world, and we see in their memories their separate paths to isolation. The memories are not the structured flashbacks normally used to advance a narrative, but instead shown as flashes of imagery, closer to the randomness of true human memories. The process works well for the first half, building an atmosphere of isolation for Woman # 1 and Woman # 2. However, the film begins to drag with Man # 1, whose backstory is oddly more complex.

If you enjoy a film that is a little different, experimental, or just like watching beautiful imagery, you might enjoy letting this film wash over you.

Another comment here gives some precious background around the film which frees us here to examine the cinematic, the work of moving illusion.

We cut at the heart of cinema when we say that memory is one of the central facets of what gives rise to reality, that faculty we have with the capacity to recall and project illusion, a cinematic subject. We have three characters stranded on a boat here, each reminiscing in turn about currents of life that brought them there.

The whole is what they were fond of calling a "cinematic poem" in those days, which means this. Memory as a way of shuffling narrative, creating currents of image so that it's not anchored on a stage, nor pivots around clearly revealed drama, but wanders off and about, free to gather up disparate views from the whole mundane horizon.

People walking places, empty windows, a flower by the side of the road, an affair, a Chaplin movie, tall grasses, these and others are all picked up to be scattered about again by the camera. It's already where Jonas Mekas would arrive a long time later.

Those were wonderful times but so different - horizons that were open then are now closed and vice versa. So when a scene of inner turmoil is transmuted as the camera wildly swinging around at the hands of the operator, you get the painterly sense desired, how the known geography in front of the eye can be made to spill like a painter mixes colors. It's French inspired in this sense, the works of Epstein and others.

We have come up with more eloquent ways since, which comes down to a single thing. The silent makers worth knowing all dismantled perception, freeing eye from world. That was enough at that stage. The question then was how to regroup these fragments in a more penetrative sense that looks behind appearances to find soul, actually do it. All the subsequent cinematic schools of note would busy themselves with ways to thread this cornucopia of images, Italians first.

This might well be what this filmmaker was doing in his way, looking for soul, and it was enough to impress Welles when he was going to be down there in Brazil a decade later. But it is also randomly scattershot for long stretches, giving simply a fragmental sense.

As a last thing to note, the wonderful experiments of the silent era would soon draw to an end, this comes on the tail end. Sound rolled in, solidifying reality back to a fixed state, removing the sense of reverie ingrained in silence. You'll see near the end here a wonderful sequence of symphonic water - film could still be thought of as music, whereas not after.

"Limite", filmed in 1930 and first exhibited in 1931, has over the last 70 years become a legendary cult movie in Brazil, voted several times as one of the best Brazilian movie ever made, and may be considered as the only reference for Brazilian poetic-experimental films of the silent area. What we have here is a film that pretends to combine the idea of a pure, "absolute" cinema - not tied to "realistic" narrative structures and trusting overall the camera – eye as the protagonist - with a poetic reflection on memory and time, a theme explored also in a 6-volume novel by Peixoto called "The uselessness of each one". As many young Brazilians from rich families who later formed the intellectual and artistic elite at the beginning of the 20th century, Peixoto received important artistic stimulus from Europe.

In 1927, at the age of 19, Peixoto spent almost a year at the "Hopedene School" in Willingdon near Eastbourne, Sussex, where he discovered a certain inclination towards acting and developed a strong appreciation for the cinema. Peixoto would return to Europe in 1929 with the expressive intension to see the latest cinema productions. Fascination for the cinema, contacts with critic/ writer Octavio de Farias, cameraman Edgar Brazil, director Adhemar Gonzaga, (Peixoto participated in the shooting of "Barro Humano" (Human Clay, a film from 1927) and the discussions held in the Chaplin Club, laid the ground work for the idea of making his own movie, where he would figure as an actor. The Chaplin Club, made up of a loose circle of friends, was founded in 1928 and until 1930 published a magazine called "The fan" dedicated to debates on the esthetics of silent cinema.

According to Peixoto, he got his final inspiration for "Limite" in august 1929. While walking through Paris he saw a photograph in the 74th edition of the French magazine "VU", a magazine which Man Ray had worked for, by the way. It was this picture that led to the writing of the scenario for "Limite", published only in 1996. The hand-written scenario was then offered to director friends Gonzaga and Mauro. But both declined. They advised him to make the film himself and to hire cameraman Edgar Brazil who had the necessary experience to guarantee the realization of the project. Shooting then began in mid 1930, using specially imported film material with a high sensitivity for grey scales and stills from Limite were soon distributed and, in an effort to raise the public expectation, they were frequently presented as photos from a new Pudovkin movie. The first screening took place on May 17th 1931 in the Capitol Cinema Rio, a session organized by the Chaplin Club, which announced "Limite" as the first Brazilian film of pure cinema. It received excellent reviews from the critics who saw the film as an original Brazilian "avant-garde" production, but also rejection by part of the audience. "Limite" never made it into commercial circuits and over the years was screened only sporadically, as in 1942 when a special session was arranged for Orson Wells (who was in South America for the shooting of the unfinished "It' s all true") and for Maria Falconetti, lead actress of Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928). Limite remained the only film ever completed by Mário Peixoto, even though he tried to realize different projects until mid 80s.

In 1959, the nitrate film began to deteriorate and two dedicated fans, Plinio Süssekind and Saulo Pereira de Mello, started a frame-by-frame restoration of the last existing copy and "Limite" only returned to festivals and screenings in 1978. The legend around the film increased when Mário Peixoto withdrew to an island living in a mansion which was a gift from his father, and he spent most of his fortune transforming it into a private museum stuffed with antiques. Due to financial problems, he later had to sell this property and move into in a small hotel where he reactivated his literary ambitions, working on his novel as well as on poems, theater plays and short stories. His final years were spent in a small flat in Copacabana, where he died in 1992 and he only survived a severe illness in the 80s because of the financial support of Walter Salles, probably today's most successful Brazilian director and producer. ("Central of Brazil", "Motorcycle Diaries", producer of "City of Good", planning his next project once again with Robert Redford – who co produced the "Diaries" – filming "No Caminho das Baleias", adaptation of a novel from Chile writer Francisco Coloane). It was also Walter Salles who in 1996 founded the "Mario Peixoto Archive" located in his production firm "Videofilmes" in Rio, where Saulo Pereira de Mello – one of the restores of Limite - and his wife take care of the original manuscripts and objects from Limite, and edit publications by and on Peixoto.

Limite is the kind of abstract film, where the author behind it, Peixoto (as director, scenarist, producer, editor, cameraperson and I'm sure protectionist for that splendid "Carlito" Charlie Chaplin scene taken from The Adventurer), is out to create a distinct and practically unrelenting mood that cinema can indeed express, that I don't think I would have had the attention span or patience for ten or fifteen years ago. Have I built up more cinematic fiber to the point where an excursion into the realm of that idiom critics love to throw around but gets used sometimes too much, a Tone Poem on celluloid, where I can find not only sections of this fascinating but intriguing as to where something might go next? It's hard to say exactly, except that by a certain point in my life I find myself connecting morr with more intricate visual flows of images and cuts and am curious as to how long a director like this can take a single image much less a sequence or Kuhleshov set up... if only it weren't quite this long.

I completely get the two sides of an audience coin for this, that someone might turn it on (via the recently restored, to the best of the World Cinema cum Brazil cinema foundations abilities, on blu ray on Criterion) and find it punishing in its lack of any traditional narrative momentum. And to an extent I get those who think the word "Masterpiece" in the description isn't even high praise enough, like the one moment where the camera following behind the one woman walking depressedly along, as she does through much of her flashbacks, and then pivots to get close on a bug resting on a small flower off to the side is worthy of a chapter in a dissertation on the whole thing, or that imposing image of the man in that hat and suit walking along like he owns all. I'm somewhere in the middle, but I want to be more positive than not.

A film like Limite was made at a time, not least of which by a director at 22 who was formed by a medium before sync sound came in to the picture quite literally, when how to express an idea or series of new and experimental ideas visually was being discovered seemingly each week, each day, all over the world. While there is this flashback uh we can call it a structure I suppose to what's happening here, albeit with very few intertitles between characters talking (I may be able to count them on one hand), this strikes me as closer to a Visual Symphony of sorts or a cavalcade of images ala Dziga Vertov, only instead of it being a place like Berlin or Russia it's a small village in Brazil where nature and the objects inside the buildings takes precedence over the direct feelings of people... OK is that accurate? Maybe there's just so much beauty and misery in the world these three, the two women and the men, one feels like they can't take it, right?

In other words, there was and there still is a place for a work like Limite which means to explore through a rhythm that is, frankly, slower paced and (another dreaded word) meditative series of not events but wanderings and this sense of loneliness and perpetual desolation, which seems to also reflect the mood in this little boat out in the sea that we don't exactly know how they got on to or why they can't just leave (as an aside I saw someone compare this to Un chien Andalou for Latin America and nope don't see it sorry but that element of dedicated surrealism to the situstion of these three can call Bunuel in his later period).

There are even some moments where we get at least suggestions of lives lived in a certain way or class or tradition that the film itself may be breaking apart, seen most clearly in a scene at the cemetery where a dramatic confrontation occurs around a parentage. Other times, I get the feeling the director means to keep human interactions to a distinct remove or distance, whether it's shots of feet or shoes as characters speak together or when two meet on a street we see it in two shots cut together that are from afar and in this bizarre looking-up way that obscures their faces.

Maybe part of that is meant to connect to the fuzziness of memory, of how a mind picks and chooses things... or is it hallucination as may be want to happen when stranded on a boat without any amenities? This is a film that has very expressive and creative camera work and some dazzling and dizzying editing - when that one man is calling out in repeated motion (mayhap like stanzas repeated in a poem or song or musical piece) and the camera rushed along like someone is rushing along, it's thrilling - and other times it's simply about solitude and disarray. Again, something very much worthy to express in a film. But I can't say I wasn't also tried by the film, at times left wanting more, that two hours makes this a lot to endure. Even Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh would be like "Enough" with the many, many shots of Soggy gray clouds.

To put it in a harsher sense, Limite is a film I'm glad exists, yet I'd be lying if I said it wasn't more engaging for me to write about than experience; later films that are the children of this sort of deliberatice poetic expression, of people more as ideas of psychology and emotions than people we can live through but have more symbolically to chew on, like Tarkovsky and Resnais films, are more my speed.

(PS: One last thing; it may be incidental, but there are points in this film where clearly the restoration team did the best they could but parts seem to be coming apart and are almost blowing away throug the wear and tear of the elements, and yet that isn't a distraction for me - on the contrary I find that to be overwhelming in this larger sense as someone who watches a lot of films, how fragile the entire medium can be (or once was). If this is an artifact of a specific time and place, how easily it can fall apart makes it still very special, quality of the substance of what was shot besides. So, God bless you, Saulo Pereira de Mello for your efforts to save this film.)

'Limite' is a great, poetic, inspiring mystery ride. I dare to say that it is the visually best film I've seen from that era. The slow, unique pace and the repeating structure of its main musical motif, Erik Satie's theme 'Gymnopédie', intensify the suggestive effect of the immensely beautifully captured images in a magnificent montage and unfolds one of the great philosophical questions of the 20th century: the unsolvable contradiction between transience of human life and the eternity of the universe. The story is hard to access, because Peixoto almost always works with flashbacks and rare title links, so we have to solve the puzzle for our own. Nevertheless, it's the imagery that is so fascinating, full of suicidal feelings, desperateness, tristesse and wonderfully compositions of nature - trees, foggy landscapes, waves. An unparalleled cinematic experience I will not forget and of course highly recommended.