Limite Sull’Arno

''Limite'' (, Portuguese for "limit" or "border") is a film by Brazilian director and writer Mário Peixoto (1908–1992), filmed in 1930 and first screened in 1931.

Cited by some as the greatest of all Brazilian films, this 120-minute, silent, and experimental feature by novelist and poet Peixoto, who never completed another film, was seen by Orson Welles and won the admiration of many, including Sergei Eisenstein, Georges Sadoul, and Walter Salles. In 2015, it was voted number 1 on the Abraccine Top 100 Brazilian films list. It's considered to be a cult film.http://www.cinelatino.com.fr/sites/default/files/lesdocs/cinemas_damerique_latine_n16_2008.pdf

Plot

In August 1929, Peixoto was in Paris, on a summer break from his studies in England, when he saw a photograph by André Kertész. The picture of two handcuffed male hands around the neck of a woman who was gazing at the camera became the 'generative' or 'Protean' image for ''Limite,'' in which a man and two women are lost at sea in a rowboat. Their pasts are conveyed in flashbacks throughout the film, clearly denoted by 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. The 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.

Cast

* Olga Breno as Woman #1
* Taciana Rey as Woman #2
* Raul Schnoor as Man #1
* Brutus Pedreira as Man #2
* Carmen Santos as Woman eating a fruit
* Mário Peixoto as Man sitting at the cemetery
* Edgar Brasil as Man asleep in the theater
* Iolanda Bernardes as Woman at the sewing-machine

Production

Peixoto wanted to play the male lead himself, and pitched the film to Brazilian directors Humberto Mauro and Adhemar Gonzaga, both of whom said that Peixoto's scenario was too personal to be played by anyone else. Peixoto decided to proceed, and 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, and where his cousin owned a farm. Stylistically, ''Limite'' follows a number of great 1920s directors: In his article on the film, critic Fábio Andrade notes the influence of D.W. Griffith, Soviet montage, the 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 ''The Adventurer (1917 film)'' by Charlie Chaplin, suggesting another important influence on Peixoto's film.

Reception

''Limite'' had three public screenings in Rio de Janeiro between May 1931 and January 1932, receiving little public support or critical acclaim. Its reputation built slowly: Vinicius de Moraes, who later became a prominent Brazilian poet and lyricist, 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 Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, during the 1940s and early 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,'' however, throughout his life. In 1965, he publicized an article about his film, apparently written by Eisenstein, praising its "luminous pain, which unfolds as rhythm, coordinated to images of rare precision and ingenuity." Peixoto was vague about the article's provenance, which lacked primary sources, claiming first that it appeared in '' Tatler'' and then an unidentified German magazine and finally admitted that he had written the text himself.

Preservation status

By 1959, the single nitrate print of ''Limite'' had deteriorated due to poor storage conditions and could no longer be screened, a situation that contributed to its near-mythical status in Brazilian film history. 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. Former FNF student Pereira de Mello managed to retrieve the print, later that year; the restoration process began with photographic reproductions of every single frame, the basis for the most recent version, made with the assistance of the Mário Peixoto Archives and Cinemateca Brasileira, which had its American premiere in Brooklyn, New York on 17 November 2010, although a crucial scene remains missing. In 2017, the Criterion Collection issued ''Limite'' on DVD and Blu-Ray, as one of Martin Scorsese's selections for its World Cinema Project.

See also

* List of rediscovered films

References

External links

* {{IMDb title, 0022080

''Limite''
at the Internet Archive
''Limite: Memory in the Present Tense''
an essay by Fábio Andrade at the Criterion Collection

1931 drama films
1931 films
Brazilian avant-garde and experimental films
Brazilian black-and-white films
Brazilian drama films
Brazilian silent films
Films set on boats
1930s avant-garde and experimental films
Silent drama films