Over the last decades, Limite has
left its mark on the cultural history, not only of Brazil. One may
think of the now somewhat overcome polemics by filmmaker Glauber Rocha
in the 1960s, rejecting Limite and favoring Ganga Bruta (1933)
by Humberto Mauro (see article below). More recently we find a sequence
of Peixoto in O cinema falado (1986), the only film by Caetano
Veloso. Singer/songwriter Adriana Calcanhoto projects scenes from Limite
during the song O Mocho e a Gatinha on her DVD Adriana
Partimpim (2004). David Bowie chooses Limite as the only
Brazilian film among his ten favorites from Latin America for the HIGH
LINE FESTIVAL in 2007. In May 2007 a new restored version of Limite
is screened at the Cannes Film Festival and was one of the selected
films from the World Cinema Foundation. An idea of Martin
Scorsese, some film-makers have decided to put together, within the World
Cinema Foundation, a non-profit organisation whose aim is to
provide financial assistance for the preservation, restoration and
broadcasting of films from all over the world, in particular the cinema
of Africa, Latin America, Asia and Central Europe. Here a dossier on
Limite elaborated by ZZ Productions, Paris http://www.zzproductions.fr
for this event. For an article on Limite in the context of
Brazilian cinema, please use
this link.
Recently, the film has been restored by
the Cinemateca Brasileira and
the new version was presented in November 2011 at the Auditorium
Ibirapuera in Sao Paulo with a new soundtrack, composed by the
Norwegian musician Bugge Wesseltoft. The musician came to Brazil to
perform a live session accompanying the screening with fellow Norwegian
Hello Kvernberg (violin) and Rodolfo Stroeter (bass), Nana
Vasconcelos (percussion) and Miranda Marlui (flute and vocal) from
Brazil. An excerpt can be seen on youtube.
For movie orders and legal issues, please contact the Cinemateca
Brasileira.
A discussion on Limite and
the (so far) unreleased documentary film on Peixoto called O mar de Mário by Reginado
Gontijo can be found here
(in Portuguese).
Next a short historic look at the unique
film of Mário Peixoto.
1.
Speaking of more experimental movies in Brazil or such films made by
Brazilian directors in the 20s and 30s, one can name basically three
productions: first, Rien Que
Les Heures (1926), filmed in Paris by Alberto Cavalcanti
(1897–1982), who would later work for the Paramount Studios and
with John Griersonus in Great-Britain before going back to Brazil;
second: São Paulo-
Sinfonia da metrópole
(1929),
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| Movie poster,
1929 |
directed by Rodolfo Lustig and Adalberto
Kemeny, a film obviously inspired by Ruttmann’s Berlin
Symphony of 1927. And finally we have Limite,
filmed in 1930 and first exhibited in 1931, directed and written by
Mário Peixoto which has over the years become a quite legendary
cult movie and has been voted several times as one of the best
Brazilian movies ever made. Even though English-speaking critics have
frequently translated the title as “boundary”, I would like
to keep the term Limite or Limit
since, in my view, it does have a certain programmatic quality. First,
I would like to point out the iconic quality of the “I” as
a structural conception that characterizes the permanent visual lines
throughout the film, as in wires, roads, bare trees, branches and
plants, stakes and posts, roofs, walls, grades, bars, fences, legs or
even stockings-ladders. And it is not by chance that after the opening
sequence – exploring a more fluid, amorphous state – the
camera focuses on the boat plank as the initial line which will then
lead us down the first memory lane. These visual lines, at times
running out into the open and at others forming limited spaces such as
triangles or crosses, therefore serve as a band, a connecting string
for the different flashes of the past as well as indicating their
limitations, giving the whole movie a very geometrical structure,
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| Still from Limite |
counterbalanced by moving details such as
wheels, handles and of course the movements of the camera itself.
Secondly, Limite may be seen as on the historical
limit between silent movies and talkies, a movie with a certain
ambition to summon up many of the esthetic and technical possibilities
developed in the 10s and 20s. From a retrospective point of view, one
may link the repetition of camera shots or the close-up of details to
Man Ray, find the same music score by Satie in Limite
as in Man Rays Les Mystères du Château des
Dés (1928), a very rhythm oriented structure as for
instance in Vertov‘s Man with a movie camera
(1929) or in the Berlin Symphony (1927) even though
of a different quality and speed, as well as the very spare use of
intertitles as in Murnau’s The Last Laugh
(1924). The boat scenes in Limite might evoke
parallels to Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) and the
shouting scenes in both also bare some similarities. The moving fields
and plants we may find on Earth (1930) by Alexander
Dovzhenko and of course one should mention an enormous variation of
camera movements and angles as an exploration of the medium
film itself.
Limite can therefore
be seen as an effort to explore the visual possibilities, the
experimental techniques and the rhythmic variations of the filmic medium
in the context of a sometimes melancholic and sometimes somewhat
aggressive statement about the limitation and the futility of human
existence. And finally we have to mention the technical limitations of
a film made without a professional backup structure, a one-man
enterprise financed by the director/writer himself. It was above all
cameraman Edgar Brazil’s brilliance that enabled the director to
realize the effects he envisioned. Edgar Brazil was born in
Hamburg/Germany as Edgar Hauschild and of similar importance in Brazil
as Karl Freund was, for instance, in Germany. He also worked with
Humberto Mauro and Adhemar Gonzaga, two other important directors of
that time and built the special equipment Peixoto required for his
elaborate movements of the camera, such as a wooden crane activated by
ropes enabling a vertical camera shift or a litter carried by four
porters used to follow the steps of a couple on the beach.
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| Shooting of
Limite: 1930 |
2.
When Mário Peixoto returned from Europe in October 1929, he
offered his hand-written scenario to director friends Gonzaga and
Mauro. But both declined. They advised him to make the film himself and
to hire cameraman Edgar Brazil who would have the necessary experience
to guarantee the realization of the project. Shooting began in mid
1930, using - for the first time in Brazil - panchromatic film material
with a high sensitivity for grey scales. Stills from Limite
were soon distributed and, in an effort to raise the public
expectation, they were occasionally presented as photos from a new
Pudovkin movie..
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| Still from
Limite: 1930 |
Still from
Limite: 1930 |
The first screening took place on May
17th 1931 in the Cinema Capitólio in
Rio de Janeiro, a session organized by the Chaplin Club,
which announced Limite as the first Brazilian film
of pure cinema. It received favorable reviews from the critics who saw
the film as an original Brazilian avant-garde production, but 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
Welles who was in South America for the shooting of his unfinished It’
s all true and for Maria Falconetti, lead actress of
Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Due
to various facts, Limite, sometimes referred to as
the “unknown masterpiece” - an expression derived from
Georges Sadoul who in 1960 had made an unsuccessful trip to Rio de
Janeiro just to see the film - along with Mário Peixoto, became
quite legendary subjects.
Soon after the first screening in Rio,
Limite was shown on several occasions in Europe, in Paris as
well as at the Marble Arch cinema in London where it
is said to have attracted Sergei Eisenstein’s interest and an
article written by him entitled A movie from
South America, supposedly published in 1931 in the The
Tatler Magazine. This article has
frequently been quoted as proof for the international recognition and
reputation of Limite, as in the program of the Berliner
Filmfestspiele in 1981 or as recently as in 2004 when At
the edge of the earth, the documentary about Mário
Peixoto, was presented in several European movie theaters. In the 40s
and 50s, Mário himself had often mentioned the Eisenstein text
but never came up with the article itself. When trying to get financing
for one of his projects – a movie called The soul
according to Salustre, in 1964 -, he was told by Plinio
Süssekind, a friend, that the article would be very helpful to
raise funds. Two weeks later Mário presented a hand written text
in Portuguese, which was actually published in 1965 by filmmaker Carlos
Diegues in his cinema-column of the Brazilian magazine Arquitectura,
vol. 38. Peixoto himself first said he had translated this text from a
French version of the original English article and later on claimed
that cameraman Edgar Brazil had translated it from German into
Portuguese, but, according to Saulo Pereira de Mello, finally admitted
to having written it himself. The article was then republished by Mello
(2000) as a text written by Mário Peixoto.
A second item to mention is the vanishing
of Limite in the 60s and 70s. In 1959, the nitrate
film began to deteriorate and Plinio Süssekind and Saulo Pereira
de Mello started a frame-by-frame restoration. Without previous
technical experience, they used procedures from specialized books. Limite
only returned to festivals and screenings in 1978. Even though nobody
could see the movie between 1959 and 1978 – as in the case of
Georges Sadoul and his unsuccessful trip to Rio de Janeiro in 1960 - it
still served as a reference for controversial discussions and
statements while others even doubted that the film really existed.
Glauber Rocha, leading figure of the new cinema, the cinema novo,
classified in 1963 the director as “far from reality and
history” (59) and the unseen movie as “unable to comprehend
the contradictions of bourgeois society” (66), a
“contradiction historically overcome” (67) and confirmed
his judgment of Limite as a product of the
intellectual decadent bourgeoisie again in 1978 after finally having
seen it.
3.
For a theoretical approach on Limite, one may think
of fluidity and continuity as two central terms, not so
much in regard to the structural concept which is based on visual and
rhythmic variations and not continuation as the main filmic principle,
but in regard to the underlying philosophical ambition: the oscillation
between a fluid memory stream and solid, concrete objects and episodes,
which emerge as fixed points in the continuity of time. This proposal
is quite clearly formulated in the article by Peixoto A movie
from South America - formerly attributed to
Eisenstein - which I understand as one of his few theoretical
statements. Here, Peixoto first emphasizes the role of the
“camera-brain” and the “instinctive rhythmic
film-structure” of Limite, and then defines
the film as somewhere between a singular , outstanding work of art and
a completely anonymous item, “unidentifiable in the inexpressive
crowds” and which’s “poetic evasion is built on a
vigorous plan of adaptation to the real” (Mello 2000: 85).
For Peixoto, the experience offered by Limite cannot
be adequately captured by language, but was made to be felt. Therefore,
the spectator should subjugate himself to the images as to
“anguished cords of a synthetic and pure language of
cinema” (88). According to the director, his film is
“meticulously precise as invisible wheels of a clock”,
where long shots are surrounded and linked by shorter ones as in a
“planetary system” (88). Peixoto characterizes
Limite as a “desperate scream” aiming for
resonance instead of comprehension. “The movie does not want to
analyze. It shows. It projects itself as a tuning fork, a pitch, a
resonance of time itself” (88), capturing the flow between past
and present, object details and contingence as if it had always
“existed in the living and in the inanimate”, or detaching
itself tacitly from them. Since Limite is more of a
state than an analysis, characters and narrative lines emerge, followed
by a probing camera exploring angels, details, possibilities of access
and fixation, only then to fade out back into the unknown, a visual
stream with certain densifications or illustrations within the
continues flow of time. According to Peixoto, all these poetic
transpositions find “despair and impossibilities”; a
“luminous pain” which unfolds in rhythm and coordinates the
“images of rare precision and structure” (91). The
oscillation between the fluid and the solid, the outstanding and the
unidentifiable, the concrete object and the abstraction is a basic
principle not only for this film but also for his literary work.
If we follow these outlines, we may see Limite as a film with a clear,
elaborate and recognizable concept, maybe difficult to identify at
first sight but emerging fuller at each screening one assists. This may
explain Peixoto’s dislike for surrealistic movies, specifically
those of Buñuel and the rejection of chance as an artistic
principle as we find in Man Ray or Dada.
Limite starts off
with the image of a woman embraced by a man in handcuffs, a prototype
image
to be varied and diversified throughout
the film. The proto-image in the beginning, based on the photography he
saw in Paris in 1929, introducing the leitmotiv of
imprisonment, of being trapped, gives way to a long, almost hypnotic
boat scene that is to transport us into the continuum of
time, a rather fluid amorphous state where the camera-brain then moves
into the past, tracing certain memory lines, episodes and associated
details, objects, movements and images, visual flashes of limitation,
that reflect themselves in other images and thus escape a fixed,
limited and solid status, only to disappear or fade out without further
explanation. The wrecking in the storm then leads us back to the
original proto-image, the initial theme, now extended and enriched by
the visual and rhythmic variations we experienced.
Let me finish this short introduction
with a comment on the soundtrack: Peixoto’s original plan to
underline his film with natural noise as wind, rustling leaves or
breaking waves was abandoned due to technical difficulties and
substituted by a record-soundtrack chosen by Brutus Pedreira, who
played the pianist in Limite and had actually been a
musician in real life. The chosen musical themes –among others,
from Satie, Debussy, Borodin, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Cesar Franck -
were then played on two alternating record players during the
screening, frequently operated by Peixoto and Pedreira themselves. Due
to this procedure, in later exhibitions, the film had been frequently
shown without any musical accompany and only with the editing of the
video, images and music have been definitely integrated. Knowing
Peixoto’s obsession with details concerning his film, arranging
even the plants to bow in a certain angle, one may look at the relation
between sound and picture of Limite as a elaborated,
frequently contrapuntal conception, an intentional rhythmic discrepancy
where sound and image often diverge, opening a third temporal and
resonant dimension between the actual scene and a potential, wider
space beyond the limitations imposed by the “framed” vision
and the sequentially of film itself.
Limite
A film by Mário Peixoto
Brazil, 1931. 115 min. Music from Satie, Debussy, Borodin, Stravinsky,
Prokofiev and Cesar Franck.
Scenario and direction: Mário Peixoto. Director of photography:
Edgar Brazil. Cast : Taciana Rei , Olga Breno, Raul Schnoor, Brutus
Pedreira , Carmen Santos , Mário Peixoto.
A translation of the intertitles :
1. Journal headlines:
Escape from prison. The prison guard’s complicity.
2. Comment:
This intertitle corresponds to a lost part of the film where man number
1 helps woman number 2.
3. Graveyard: Man on the left
(Mário Peixoto):
You come from the house of a woman, who is not yours,
supposing she is mine, just like this one here was yours.
And if I told you that she is leprous?
Bibliography
Farias, Otavio
1929 Eu creio na imagem. In: O fan, vol. 6. Rio de Janeiro.
Mello, Saulo Pereira de
2000 Mário Peixoto - Escritos sobre cinema. Rio de
Janeiro: aeroplano.
Peixoto, Mário
1984 O inútil de cada um. Rio de Janeiro: Record.
Peixoto, Mário
1996 Limite. "scenario" original. Rio de Janeiro: Sette Letras.
Rocha, Glauber
2001 Revisão Crítica do Cinema Brasileiro.
São Paulo: Cosac & Naify.
Schobert, Walter
1989 Der Avant-Garde Film der 20er Jahre. München:
Goethe-Institut.
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