Limite (Brazilian Portuguese for “limit” or “border”) is a film, directed, written and produced by Mário Peixoto, who was inspired by photograph by André Kertész.
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Limite (Brazilian Portuguese for “limit” or “border”) is a film, directed, written and produced by Mário Peixoto, who was inspired by photograph by André Kertész.
Limite was filmed in 1930 and first screened in 1931. It was restored from 1966 to 1978 from a single damaged nitrate print, and one scene remains missing.
This experimental silent feature was made by novelist and poet Peixoto, who never completed another film.
In August 1929, Peixoto was in Paris, on a summer break from his studies in England, when he saw a photograph by Andre Kertesz of two handcuffed male hands around the neck of a woman who is gazing at the camera. This became the ‘generative’ or ‘Protean’ image for Limite.
The film’s unusual structure has kept the film in the margins of most film histories, where it has been known mainly as a provocative and legendary cult film.
A man and two women are lost at sea in a rowboat. Their pasts are conveyed in flashbacks throughout the film, clearly denoted by changes in music. One woman has escaped from prison; another has left an oppressive and unhappy marriage; the man is in love with someone else’s wife.
Peixoto wanted to play the male lead himself, and pitched the film to Brazilian directors Humberto Mauro and Adhemar Gonzaga, who concurred.
Peixoto paid for the production using family funds. He filmed in 1930 on the coast of Mangaratiba, a village about 50 miles from Rio de Janeiro, where his cousin owned a farm.
Stylistically, Limite follows a number of great 1920s directors Critic Fábio Andrade notes the influence of D.W. Griffith, Soviet montage, German Expressionist works of F.W. Murnau and Robert Wiene, French Surrealist shorts by Germaine Dulac and Man Ray, Robert J. Flaherty, Carl Theodor Dreyer and particularly Jean Epstein, all of which are visible in German-born Edgar Brasil’s cinematography.
One scene takes place at a screening of Chaplin’s 1917 The Adventurer, suggesting another important influence on Peixoto’s film.
Limite had three public screenings in Rio de Janeiro between May 1931 and January 1932, receiving little support or critical acclaim.
Its reputation built slowly: Vinicius de Moraes, who became a prominent Brazilian poet, showed the film to Orson Welles, when he visited Brazil in 1942 to film parts of It’s All True.
Other screenings took place in private film societies, alongside works by Eisenstein and Pudovkin, during the 1940s and 1950s.
Peixoto died in 1992, aged 83, leaving a substantial body of literary work, unproduced screenplays and scenarios, and a fragment of a planned second feature film, Onde a terra acaba, which never was completed and mostly lost in a fire.
Peixoto continued to promote Limite throughout his life. In 1965, he publicized an article about the film, supposedly written by Eisenstein, praising its “luminous pain, which unfolds as rhythm, coordinated to images of rare precision and ingenuity.” He finally admitted that he had written it himself.
By 1959, the single nitrate print of Limite had deteriorated due to poor storage. It was stored at the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia (FNF) until 1966 when the military dictatorship’s police force confiscated it, along with works by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and other Soviet directors.
