Limite

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.

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.)

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.

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.

'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.