You should never subject yourself to inadequate films. This is not always possible. You should also listen to recommendations if several people harass you to follow them up. Like Limite, the subject of this week’s newsletter. It felt like I couldn’t move for people telling me to watch it. I’m glad I did. You should too.
In late July, I’ll be attending New Horizons film festival in Wroclaw, Poland. I’ll also be posting from there. Drop me a DM if you think there’s something particular I need to cover.
— The year is 1930. Mário Peixoto—a Brazilian poet and dramatist, twenty two years old—has just finished shooting his first (and only) film, Limite. Until several weeks ago, I had literally no awareness of its existence. Not once have I seen it referenced in the histories of early film (maybe I’ve been too lazy). Like Aphrodite breaking from the forehead of Zeus, it appeared. Just as, over the years, its single negative copy lay blasted and withering on a shelf. This explains its allegedly mythological status (particularly in Brazil). Peixoto himself contributed to the rumours that have risen around it. Fast forward. First, it was restored by the efforts of two critics during the 1970. I don’t know who. It was restored again by the Cinematecca Brasileira and the Cinetecca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with The World Cinema Project, in 2010, and now it’s on MUBI.
— Beginning. What is remarkable about Limite is its freshness, or its modernity. I don’t mean its muscular cinematic modernism, though it has this. I mean: how, against the eye (swallowed), I can think of few things that feel as immediately contemporary as this work. It cavorts with an unprecedented fluidity. It feels like a piece of outsider art, unbeholden to the rules of cinema as they were then being laid down. I thought of an interview given by Orson Welles. He spoke of the creative thrill of “ignorance”. The ignorant filmmaker, he argued, is a truly creative filmmaker. Why? Because they do not think about which shots are possible. They take risks because they are not aware of failure. Limite is the product of an artist who, given a camera, decided that it was simply a disembodied extension of the eye (theirs), and did not treat or handle it as a “film camera” (i.e., an instrument for reproducing cinema as a set of inherited norms and practices). It becomes like Brodsky’s eye, identifying “itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention”. But I might be a little wrong about this (keep reading).
— We owe some of this effect to the latest restoration. Cleverly interpolated, the actions of its three principal protagonists (Man 1, Woman 1 and Woman 2) unfold with a natural weightiness. None of the jump/juddering of un-restored cinema, bereft of sufficient frames to capture the ordinary corporeality of the human body. When Hombre 1 gazes laconically across the sea, we drink the fatigue of his eyelids. We notice the gentle movement as his shoulders tense and shift.
— There are times when the obliterating decay of the negative interrupts the edges of the frame, complicating their bodies in a deluge of boiled marks and rotten froth. But for the most part the film stock has been spared - as clear and as crisp as a digital photograph. You can make out the cracked dryness of their skin, their lips. In contrast, Eisenstein and even Jean Epstein’s Finnis Terrae (its closest aesthetic ally) feel almost (but not really) lumpen. Jarring. We sense-toward these bodies as bodies - not the scattered light of erratic projection.
— Limite functions through ambience. With barely any intertitles, it operates through gestures and repetitious compositions. It is a film of the body. It is a film of movement, without sublimating movement (the body) to choreography (where authenticity and emotion dies). The gestures and glances that create its look are generously human(e). They lift and heft and shift with real weight. Friction.
— So far as its fabula is concerned, Limite is the story of three nameless individuals who find themselves adrift at sea. In flashbacks, we are told their stories - of what led them to this place. Those scenes of the present (the boat they occupy) are heavy with a sense of entropy. They eat (small biscuits, insufficient). They trail their hands in the water. Contemplative, they interrogate the lack or loss that has brought them here - an entirely unrelated sequence of abandonments/auto-exiles that bring them together; unfamiliar compatriots on this doomed boat. It takes water. Eventually, it breaks apart - their bodies slipping beneath the waves. It is hopeless, an eerie death-drive toward dissolution and dispersal.
— An uncredited article speaks of Limite’s visual coherence, citing the array of lines that demarcate the composition of its frame. Wires, branches, ladders, planks, each recurring and directing the eye toward an invisible point beyond the edge of the frame. Piexoto himself speaks of its poetics as an intimation of “despair and impossibility”, a “luminous pain” that unfolds through precisely recursive visual structures. There is no fat to it, a thing reduced back to a structural congruence behind which sits an abyss of unknowable despair. We feel toward this ambience. Piexoto does not spell out the framing story, only gives us the visual structures that orient it - a “rhythmic film structure” (as Peixoto called it) that gives trajectory to the rhythmic arrangement of its images. The stifling close up, the Expressionistic silhouetting of a body against its landscape.
— Intimations of desperation, of suicide. A thumb running against the edge of a blade. A spinning camera that crests the edge of a perilous cliff. Rope, verticality, high walls of stone. If the rhythmic recurrence of lines (shooting away from the screen, radiating) intimate a trajectory beyond the frame, then death - another, final trajectory - haunts it also. Woman 2 and Man 1, the frame titled gently to the right, waist deep in grass (it is a low angle), peering into the inchoate space beyond the composition. Death awaits. It becomes a desperate desire toward escape, dissolution.
— Escape. The film’s inspiration came when Peixoto glimpsed the cover of a French magazine, the photograph taken by André Kertész. It depicted a woman with a man’s hands looped in front of her neck, bound by shackles. This very same image is repeated at the very beginning of the film. The hands fall away. It is a film of release. Limit(e). Polysemic, singular. A declarative utterance. Escaping from an oppressive, unhappy marriage; escaping from prison; escaping from an unrequited love, it cannot be pursued.
— Limit(ation). That is to say, the limits (extremes) of human experience, of endurance. This not only has to do with the caustic extremity of the three protagonists as they endure (persistently) on their cast-adrift boat. Limite implies that life itself (yes, life) is extremity, particularly as fed through its ordinariness. Nothing that happens to these characters inhabits the extreme. They live, and this is enough. They survive. This is sufficient. Rescue seems impossible. They have drifted far beyond the shores of survival. Language is irrelevant here. At the point of collapse—of ruin—language has fled (it flees). Cinema begins where language ends. Peixoto understood (even as a writer) that the technologies of film—and its particular eschatology—are not simply a continuation of narration by other means. They are entirely ruptured from it. Language cannot persist here. We are at the edge (the limit) of language, too. The lens points down, through a thicket of branches (we picture Piexoto or his cinematographer, tangled up there). The lens brushes very, very close (intimately) at the objects on Woman 2’s working table (she is a seamstress, I think). Measuring tape, thread, cogs and needles. Her entrapment is an entrapment by the drudgery of labour. Her flight (escape) toward death is, then, an escape from the ordinary. This requires no flight of fancy; she merely needs to drift from scene to scene, place to place. A cliff, an empty street (the camera positioned on the floor, capturing her legs at an unfamiliar angle).
— Rhythm. Its inarticulate rhythmic structure is reminiscent of Jean Epstein (I’ve already said this), but also of Eisenstein. Unlike Eisenstein, it is less choreographic. Its gestures and movements are less exaggerated. Peixoto locates rhythm in a more undulating and treacle-like montage. Repetitions abound. The camera lunges toward Man 1’s face (his hands are clutching at his own face), and then moves away, and then lunges, and then moves away. It is like the work of Jean-Daniel Pollet. For this, it embodies a kind of ambient montage. Its cuts feel less live cleavings than sutures, between which things are allowed to (freely) flow. MoMA refer to it as a “tone poem” (again, that reliance on language).
— Really, Piexoto (and Edgar Brasil, his cinematographer) made a very daring decision to dislocate the camera from its tripod (not always, but often). This itself is a kind of formalistic ‘release’. It put the camera at the limit of its own technology, its own weight - and, by extension, quite literally, the bodies of those who were operating it. It leans this way and that. It peers down, the lens intercut by the interruption of phone lines and buildings. Geometry, radiance. Etc.
— To help with the promotion of his film, Peixoto - a very funny person, actually - sent stills of the shoot to the press claiming they were of a new Pudovkin film. Later, he wrote ‘praise’ of the film, pretending he was Eisenstein. The film was, later, impounded by the Brazilian authorities, alongside the films of Pudovkin and Eisenstein. Poetic justice, Etc.
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