Limite

At first glance, it might appear somewhat ironic that LIMITE remains the one work with which most people identify multi-talented Mario Peixoto today. While Peixoto kept writing poetry, essays and various manuscripts throughout his life, this film remained his one contribution in the cinematic world. After its initial release in 1931, the film was virtually unavailable for decades, making it hard for the general public and historians alike to judge for themselves if this so-called "masterpiece" which Peixoto had produced in his youth really was worthy of so much acclaim. However, recently I had the opportunity of seeing LIMITE on a big screen with live musical arrangement, and I am forced to admit that the film's current status as a phenomenon has rather little to do with its unavailability; it remains genuinely impressive, starkingly beautiful to this day.

The story finds several mentally defeated persons recalling their past in a boat. Peixoto takes use of several flash-backs which might appear confusing, especially since there are only some very few title cards present throughout this silent film. However, exactly what the story is about is less relevant (and interesting) than how it is being visually executed, and furthermore the emotional impact it leaves upon us. Through his extensive use of close-ups, landscapes, storms and shadows, Peixoto manipulates us into imagining his visions as being truly real, physical presences. For instance, when showing us a group of people enjoying a Charlie Chaplin-short at a theater, his way of visually describing the term laughter becomes so convincing that we nearly forget that we, in fact, are observing another group of observers; they become part of us, and we flow within one another into one eternity.

Peixoto covers laughter, and he covers death, nature, despair and small-town life. You find yourself sitting at the edge of your seat not because you're wondering what's going to happen next, but due to what you're observing each moment. Even though it is evident that Peixoto was heavily inspired by earlier experimental film directors (the masters of German expressionism come to mind), one of the major reasons why it leaves such a profound impact is precisely because it was made at such a late point in the silent era; too late to make an impact on the silent medium, it is almost disturbing how bluntly it reveals exactly what was lost when silent films died. For a long time, the focus on dialogue in talking films made directors blind, forcing the film medium to take one huge step backwards in terms of aesthetics. Of course, things have changed to the better since that time, but LIMITE still remains a thought-provoking reminder as to not forget that film, after all, first and foremost is a visual medium, where beauty should play a central part.

In a drifting small boat, two women and a man recall their recent past. One of the women escaped from the prison; the other one was desperate; and the man had lost his lover. They have no further strength or desire to live and have reached the limit of their existences. Why they are together in this boat it is not clearly explained (or understood by me).

"Limite" is a Brazilian piece of art. The storyline is very simple, but the images are amazing, being a poetic and impressive exhibition of pictures in movement. The rhythm is very slow paced and sometimes the viewer certainly will get tired, but it is worthwhile. Mário Peixoto was sixteen years old when he directed this film. The film had been vanished for more than forty years, and was retrieved and partially restored in the 70's by Saulo Pereira de Mello and Plínio Sussekind. One small part was completely lost, and there is one reel in a very bad condition. The soundtrack, with magnificent musics of Borodin, Cesar Frank, Debussy, Prokofieff, Ravel, Satie and Strawinsky fits perfectly to this movie. "Limite" follows European standards, and in accordance with a Brazilian Video Guide, in a previous exhibition in London for filmmakers, Sergei Eisenstein was the first one to recognize the geniuses of "Limite", followed by Vsevolod Poudovkine. I believe that watching this movie is basic for any movie lover or student. My vote is ten.

Title (Brazil): "Limite" ("Limit")

Obs.: On 12 November 2005 and 28 November 2007, I saw this magnificent movie again.

The real Limite, as opposed to its myth, is an elaborate experimental home movie made by a very bright 22-year-old, getting his rocks off about his frustrated love life -- an affair with a married woman. The film got produced only because of his family's wealth and connections -- but after it was made, no one in Brazil would distribute it, so it disappeared from sight and gradually languished into a "cult film."

It's worth a look for its ravishing flashes of brilliance, and especially for its use of the camera as an active participant -- allowed to express the frustration & rage that the characters are "limited" from expressing openly (as extra-marital relationships were still a taboo subject in Brazil in 1930?). But without the musical sound track assembled from well-known compositions by Satie, Debussy, Stravinsky, etc. it'd be unwatchable for most of its 2 hours of meandering and deliberately veiled self-indulgence.

A cinematic masterpiece? On a par with films by Dreyer or Vigo or Welles? That's just Brazilian hype. Apparently abetted by the director himself who in 1965 -- out of yet more frustration & rage at the poor reception his magnum (and only) film opus had received -- published a Portuguese translation of a glowing review by none other than "Sergei Eisenstein" -- but no one could locate the original, and Peixoto finally acknowledged, shortly before his death in 1992, that he had penned it himself.

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.

This is an absolute brazilian classic, and I wouldn´t be too patriot to call it as an international classic as well, altough it must be very hard for foreigners to be able to see this one. There isn´t much of a story, but Mário Peixoto (who never directed any other film in his life) give us a very stylistic film, in which, as in all silent films, what matters is what is shown, and not what is told. In fact, there are only two "dialogs" in the whole movie.

Limite is almost a filmed poetry, and we´re carried away by its smooth rhythym and great visual power. A must-see picture.