Limite (Limit) (Cinedia, Brazil, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After A Holly Dolly Christmas I switched to Turner Classic Movies for a “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of a 1931 movie from Brazil called Limite (the title simply means “Limit,” though its relevance to the story remains unclear -- like a lot of other things about this movie -- and host Jacqueline Stewart pronounced the title “Luh-MEE-chay”). It was produced, written and directed by Mario Peixoto (pronounced “Pay-CHO-to”), a young Brazilian from a well-to-do family who had been to Europe to study art and while there saw a magazine photo of a woman who’d been arrested and handcuffed in front of her face with a device that looked like something from the Middle Ages. Peixoto decided he wanted to make a movie that would open and close with that image, and he hired two experienced cinematographers, Edgar Brazil and Ruy Costa, for a film which gives whole new meanings to the word “elliptical.” Using a carefully chosen set of classical pieces -- almost all by 20th century composers (Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1, the string quartets by Debussy and Ravel, Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Festivals, Stravinsky’s The Firebird -- particularly the opening “Introduction of the Firebird” and the Infernal Dance of King Kastchei -- and Prokofieff’s “Classical” Symphony, along with a bit of Cesar Franck’s Third Chorale for Organ and Debussy’s ragtime piece “Golliwogg’s Cakewalk”) -- Peixoto shot a film that at times gets so abstract it looks like a forerunner of Geoffrey Reggio’s -qatsi movies even though there is something of a plot.

The film actually has four central characters, though in a strategy to dehumanize them and turn them into archetypes Peixoto decided not to give them names but just call them “Woman #1” (Olga Breno), “Woman #2” (Tatiana Rey), “Man #1” (Raul Schnoor) and “Man #2” (Brutus Pedrera). Like the overall abstract visual style, the business of not giving the characters names was done to death by 1960’s filmmakers who thought they were being oh so innovative. The film got rave reviews from Brazilian critics but flopped commercially and was only shown sporadically in its home country until the 1970’s, when the Brazilian film archive attempted a restoration. What we were seeing was a more complete and extensive restoration from 2007 through 2010, which included copying Peixoto’s original sound design (as preserved on the film’s soundtrack discs -- this is what Sergei Eisenstein called a “sound film” rather than a silent or a talkie, one which would feature no dialogue but would include music and sound effects -- though Peixoto didn’t actually use sound effects -- to tell its story) with more modern recordings of the original classical pieces Peixoto had used. (I suspect that for the Satie Gymnopedie they used the original 1920’s recording Peixoto had used because they couldn’t find a more modern version in the same arrangement; Satie wrote the piece for solo piano but the version we hear is by a woodwind ensemble with an oboe as the lead instrument.) According to Jacqueline Stewart’s introduction, both Eisenstein and Orson Welles saw this film and praised it highly -- and certainly it affected the later (and both ill-starred and uncompleted) projects Eisenstein and Welles did in Latin America, Que Viva Mexico! and It’s All True, respectively.

It’s an utterly haunting film with some of the most gorgeous black-and-white images ever captured on screen -- including a scene that’s heart-rending today for all the wrong reasons, showing the Amazon rain forest as it looked before greedy farmers, developers and speculators started destroying whole swaths of it -- while at the same time attempting to tell something of a story. It seems that one of the women -- the one we saw handcuffed in the opening scene -- escaped from prison with the connivance of a guard (I’m assuming she got him to help her by seducing him -- or have I just been watching too many Lifetime prison stories?) and ultimately got rescued by one of the men (the film takes place in a rowboat at sea but frequently cuts to other parts of the story representing the characters’ flashbacks to their previous lives, which when I read that description on the TCM Web site I thought, “Oh, it’s In Which We Serve without the war”). There’s also a sequence in which the two men confront each other at a cemetery and it turns out -- via three dialogue intertitles that are the only titles in the film (aside from one inserted by the restorers to cover footage that was too badly deteriorated to be salvageable -- most of the film has held up well but one reel has severe nitrate burns on either side of the screen, though as I joked to Charles the nitrate burns only add to the abstractions of the images) -- that they’re at the grave of the wife of one of the men, only shortly after his wife died he started an affair with the other’s partner and the other is naturally upset about it.

This is an odd turn indeed in a movie that for the most part has gone out of its way to avoid either depicting or triggering human emotions -- in one of the few scenes that shows anyone besides the four principals, Peixoto shoots people walking on a street but dehumanizes them by showing only their torsos and legs. Indeed, the one flaw Limite has is this jarring contrast between abstract imagery and these periodic attempts to dramatize the lives and pasts of the principals. I’ve seen other avant-garde silent films, including the 1926 Japanese movie A Page of Madness, that did a better job than Limite in using abstract imagery and virtually no verbal cues while still telling a recognizable story and giving the characters real human dimensions. Still, Limite is a haunting movie, well worth seeing for the sheer beauty of the images (it’s yet another film from the classic era in which the black-and-white scenes are so gorgeous you wonder why anyone ever thought the movies needed color -- at one point I wondered if the film would have been better in color but I decided it probably wouldn’t have been because color would have added too much weight to the imagery and made it almost unwatchable) and a film that would probably repay repeated viewings, if only better to sort out the tangle between its various shards of plot in between all the glorious imagery and the use of music as a deliberate contrast to the images -- essentially music-video technique 50 years early.