Limite
Plots(1)
Mário Peixoto’s visually entrancing Brazilian classic was the director’s only film. A stunning silent poem inspired by a photograph by André Kertesz, Limite was described by Peixoto as ‘a tuning fork’ to capture the pitch of a moment in time, recounting a simple story of three people adrift on a boating trip. 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. (official distributor synopsis)
(more)Reviews (1)
One of the peaks of the silent era, but above all a connection between it and film modernism. The introduction, still using slow dissolves, which formally underline the metaphorical closeness/collision of melancholic images, reminds us of the poetic symbolism of the turn of the century (which the modern restorers of the film emphasized by choosing music from the impressionist C. Debussy). But let's not be deceived: the subsequent scenes belong primarily to the avant-garde, "artistic" tendency in modern film, in which the narrative is minimized, and in the space it has emptied, there is room for the autonomy of the film image and its unique language, through which the film primarily speaks. Sequences liberated from the weight of the narrative (although probably somewhat less so in the original because the original intertitles have mostly not survived) allow everything captured by the camera to unfold its own poetics - details of things, details of characters, the montage game, the unpredictability of the camera, and abstraction and references of the work to its medium.
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Gallery (3)
Photo © Rai
