This is one of those legendary films seen by relatively few but praised and admired by those lucky enough to have caught it, among them influential film historian-journalist Georges Sadoul and award-winning director Walter Salles (Central Station, 1998; The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004).
Limite (Portuguese for “limit” or “border”) is often considered the greatest Brazilian-made film of all time. This two-hour experimental silent was written and directed by Mário Peixoto (1908-1992), the only film he ever made. Peixoto, who also played a bit part, financed the film with funds from his wealthy, elite Brazilian family, shooting on the coast of Mangaratiba, near Rio de Janeiro, where his cousin owned a farm.
According to Peixoto, the inspiration for this work came from a photo by André Kertész that he saw in a Paris magazine in 1929. From the image of two handcuffed male hands around a woman’s neck, Peixoto created a very loose and unconventional “narrative” about a man and two women lost at sea in a rowboat. Flashbacks, signaled by excerpts of music by Satie, Debussy, Stravinsky and others, show glimpses of their pasts, including prison terms, unhappy marriages and infidelity.
When the scenario of 220 individual shots was published in 1996 (thanks in large part to Salles), it revealed that the film hewed closely to the manuscript’s detailed description of camera angles and movements, a blueprint for a work that “does not tell a story, nor does it give insights into any kind of psychological state of mind among the three main characters,” but “’thinks’ in pictures…, trying to intertwine the diverse visual fields by using certain symbolic themes and variations.” (Michael Korfmann, Senses of Cinema, July 2006).
Limite had a few public screenings in Rio de Janeiro in 1931 and early 1932 that generated little interest or support. Peixoto quickly moved on to make his reputation as a poet and novelist, but he never stopped writing about his film. In 1965 he publicized a laudatory article about it, purportedly by cinema pioneer Sergei Eisenstein, although Peixoto later admitted he had written the article himself.
Even without his efforts at self-promotion, the film’s reputation grew. Orson Welles reportedly saw it in 1942 when he was in Brazil filming his unfinished documentary It’s All True. Prints occasionally showed up at private film society screenings over the decades, imparting a cult status that grew in the late 1950s when the original print was discovered to have decayed so badly in storage that it could no longer be screened. The print, along with others by Soviet filmmakers, was confiscated by the country’s military dictatorship in 1966 but retrieved later by a former film student.
The lengthy restoration process of photographing each frame individually was completed in 1978, although a crucial scene was said to still be missing. Limite was screened in New York in 1979 as part of Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films series. New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote that Peixoto’s visual choices were “flashy, impetuous and never less than interesting.”
Further restoration was undertaken and a complete two-hour version was shown at the World Cinema Foundation festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2010.
“Limite is a great work in world cinema in the sense that it is a completely independent film that has a unique place in Brazilian and film history,” said Kent Jones, executive director of the foundation, at the time of the screening. “It’s a glorious film, a work of exquisite, handcrafted visual beauty that exceeds its reputation.”
In 2017, the Criterion Collection issued the film on DVD/Bluray as one of director Martin Scorsese's selections for its World Cinema Project.
Director: Mario Peixoto
Producer: Mario Peixoto
Writer: Mario Peixoto
Cinematographer: Edgar Brasil
Editing: Mario Peixoto
Cast: Olga Breno (Woman #1), Tatiana Rey (Woman #2), Raul Schnoor (Man #1), Brutus Pedreira (Man #2), Carmen Santos (Woman eating fruit), Mario Peixoto (Man at cemetery), Edgar Brasil (Man asleep in theater), Iolanda Bernardes (Woman at sewing machine)
By Rob Nixon
