Limite (Limits, 1931), directed by Brazilian filmmaker Mario Peixoto, is one of the very first films to have been restored by the World Cinema Foundation – back in 2012 –, which has been touring all sorts of cinema-related events ever since, becoming synonymous with the faraway film industries and with the samples of pioneering that was salvaged from the fire of forgetfulness by a handful of generous professionals. Thanks to these efforts of restoration, Limite – which, if I am not mistaken, is also the catalog’s oldest title – touches us to this very day with the same vigorous peaks in its mise-en-scène and with its opening towards fantasy, which, at the beginning of the forties, was capable of catching the eye of one Orson Welles, who was visiting Brazil at the time to unleash his creative verve… This sole directorial effort of poet Mario Peixoto has more than just a given edge in contrast to its times – both in terms of formal options and of the moral dilemmas at play – as we have seen in other cases;  beyond anything, it’s striking to this day through its resistance to the spectator’s domesticating eye, persevering in the name of a fundamental opacity, as an impenetrable object, all the deeper in its enigma.

Limite is indeed hard to comprehend for contemporary audiences, which have meanwhile been invaded by almost a century of stories, of hearts worn on the sleeve, of conclusions written out in clear points – of content increasingly willing to make concessions. Its storyline is thin, at best allusive; the feelings are oblique, and the conclusions are yet to arrive. A handful of flashbacks vaguely recall the bitter fates of these three characters – two women and a man – who, at the beginning of the film, are floating in a boat that is adrift. It’s precisely this beginning that announces the color: here, we see a bountiful suite of shots of the rocking boat, its passengers framed from different angles, the water shining in the sunlight. There is no essential information in these shots that would facilitate a given position regarding what is shown. If Limite truly wanted to belong to the era of silent cinema – in 19931 the world had decidedly, if not uncontroversially, pivoted towards sound –, this is not exclusively due to its reticence towards dialog and exposition, but especially due to the elements that the film must put into the right place in order to claim its title as a film: the quality of light, the framing options, the barely-sketches gestures of the actors, and the air which all of these elements mobilize. These are things that don’t “speak” for themselves, preferring to ask the spectator for an active mobilization, calling them to gaze upon the images instead of attempting to decrypt them.

Here, Peixoto doesn’t construct a literal narration. Limite is closer to a weather report or the applied status of cinegenics: the way in which the face and body of a character are molded by the light, in a renewed miracle of technique. Let us not be hasty, however, because the film’s ambition is manifest: the editing increasingly accumulates in its speed (like in the case of Gance), it reprises shots that are resplendent in meaning (like in the case of Eisenstein), it cultivates the loss of references (like in the case of Epstein). Just look at the moment in which the camera, which, up to that point, had been following one of the women, leaves her alone in her misery, as she soars high, above the coast, in fluttering pirouettes. It’s one of the few sequences in which Limite seems animated by the verve of the new art, which seems to be part of an uncontrollable impulse of writing through the image. Such a movement would come across nowadays as a peak of mannerism or naïveté, while in the world of yesteryear, it was still capable of showcasing the primitive nonchalance of the apparatus. But it’s important to note the film’s somber style, which unfurls itself in a continuum of matter – man, cloud, road, object: all mix in the mise-en-scène that prefers long sequences to express what a classical film would have quickly dismissed –, but it’s just as little preoccupied with the celebration of pure cinetism, as it is with the exploration of sumptuous, studio-style sets, that is, of interacting with the era’s two main directions. 

In fact, if Limite does indeed engage in a larger choreography of the world, it’s rather more a part of a danse macabre. The downfall, imprisonment, and impossibility of love are the film’s ultimate horizons. In other words, the universe orchestrated by Peixoto has nothing of the exaltation of the early dawn, but rather, it dissolves into a frantic dance of pains and sorrows that govern existence itself, from the domestic (the ill-advised marriage of the woman who ends up abandoning her husband) to the cosmic (the grandiose storm, shown in a frenzied chain of shots, which closes the film). Peixoto drilled deep into the dark recesses of humanity, and the result is an oeuvre with pessimistic anchors that evoke the future work of Bela Tarr, but that is still sufficiently supple as to dissolve itself in a diaphanous, atmospheric flux, like in the films of Alexander Sokurov. According to a recent poll, Limite is considered to be the best Brazilian film of all time. It’s not hard to see why this is so: here, Peixoto marks the first dusk of cinema – that of the dazzling image, that could be grasped in all of its senses, that was fully autonomous. Cinema invested in other territories later on, but the bereavement of this age of absolute image has still not come to an end.

Limite is available on MUBI.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.