Mario Peixoto: The making of Limite

Just like many Brazilian artists of his time, Mário Peixoto received important artistic stimuli from Europe. His stay in England at the Hopedene School in Willingdon, near Eastbourne, Sussex, in 1926-7, at the age of 19, evoked his first inclination towards acting, developed his strong appreciation for cinema, especially for Russian and German movies, and probably led to his first experimentation with his homosexuality. With regard to cinema, Peixoto particularly admired the work of directors such as Fritz Lang, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, F. W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. He would return to Europe in 1929 with the express intention of seeing the latest cinema productions that were unavailable in Brazil.

Another source of inspiration was his contact with the local art scene in Rio de Janeiro, such as with the cameraman Edgar Brazil, the director Adhemar Gonzaga – Peixoto assisted in the shooting of one of his films, Barro Humano (Human Clay), in 1927 – and the critic and writer Octávio de Farias. The latter was a member of the Chaplin Club, a loose circle of friends founded in 1928 that, until 1930, published a magazine called The Fan, which was dedicated to debates on the æsthetics of silent cinema.

According to Peixoto, he got his final inspiration for Limite in August 1929, on his second trip to Europe. While walking through Paris, he saw a photograph by André Kertesz in the 74^th issue of the French magazine, VU, a magazine that other famous photographers like Man Ray had also been working for. It was this picture that led to the writing of the scenario for Limite, which was published for the first time only in 1996. The image of a woman embraced by a man in handcuffs returned into the film in the opening and ending sequences as a prototype-image.

The scenario with its 220 listed shots shows itself to be a very explicit manual with detailed descriptions of camera positions, angles and movements for cameraman Edgar Brazil to use. The final cut of Peixoto’s film sticks very closely to the scenario.

In comparison with the scenarios of other silent avant-garde movies of the 1920s, for instance Man Ray’s manuscript for L’étoile de mer (1928) (9), or even the script by Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz for Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), it must be said that Peixoto’s text does not tell a story, nor does it give insights into any kind of psychological state of mind among the three main characters. Rather, it “thinks” in pictures, movements and angles, trying to intertwine the diverse visual fields by using certain symbolic themes and variations. From the outset, the filmic style of Limite is part of the scenario and not a result of an interpretation or transformation of the textual outline by subsequent shooting. The metaphor of the “camera brain” – a frequent term used by many avant-garde filmmakers – is also present in Peixoto’s scenario, in which the use of intertitles is avoided, with one short exception, and reliance is placed overall on the camera and its movements. Limitetherefore accomplishes what Germaine Dulac had demanded in 1927: the “real” filmmaker should “divest cinema of all elements not particular to it, to seek its true essence in the consciousness of movement and visual rhythms” (10).

Taking in account the scenario as well as the actual movie, Limite must be seen as a film with a clear, elaborated and recognisable concept. This may explain Peixoto’s dislike of surrealistic movies, specifically those of Luis Buñuel, and the rejection of chance as an artistic principle, as found in Man Ray or Dada. Limite starts off with the image of a woman embraced by a man in handcuffs, a prototype image that goes on being modified throughout the film. The opening proto-image, from the photograph he saw in Paris in 1929, introduces theleitmotiv of imprisonment, of being trapped, and gives way to a long, almost hypnotic boat scene that is to transport us into the continuum of time, a rather fluid amorphous state in which the camera then moves into the past, tracing certain memory lines, episodes and associated details, objects, movements and images. These visual flashes of limitations are reflected in other images and thus escape from their fixed, limited and solid status, only to disappear or fade out without further explanation. The wrecking in the storm at the end then leads us back to the original proto-image, the initial theme, now extended and enriched by the visual and rhythmic variations that have been experienced. The scenario and film can therefore best be characterised as a visual cinematic poem that explores the medium for its poetic capacities, instead of using it for transporting non-visual conceptions and narratives.

Peixoto then offered the scenario to his director friends Gonzaga and Mauro. But both of them declined and advised him to make the film himself and to hire the cameraman Edgar Brazil, who would have the necessary experience to ensure completion of the project. Shooting began in mid-1930, using imported panchromatic film material with a high sensitivity for grey scales.

Limite had its première on 17 May 1931, in the Cinema Capitólio in Rio de Janeiro, in a session organised by the Chaplin Club. It received favourable reviews from the critics, who saw the film as an original Brazilian avant-garde production, but it was also rejected by part of the audience and never made it into commercial circuits. Over the years, it was screened only sporadically, as in 1942, when a special session was arranged for Orson Wells, who was in South America for the shooting of his unfinished It’s all True, and for Maria Falconetti, lead actress of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928).

Limite remained the only film Peixoto succeeded in finishing, even though a number of other projects were discussed or even initiated up until the 1960s. His literary ambitions, which went as far back as 1930 and included poetry, short stories, theatrical plays and a six-volume novel with strong autobiographical traits calledO inútil de cada um (The uselessness of everyone) and on which he worked obsessively almost until the end of his life, also did not gain a wider response among the public. So far, only the first volume of this novel has been published (in 1984), while the remaining volumes are being prepared for publication by the Mário Peixoto Archives.

Because of financial problems, Peixoto had to sell most of the property he inherited from his wealthy family later on in his life, and he moved into a small hotel. His final years were spent in a small flat in Copacabana, where he died in 1992. He had only survived a severe illness in 1991 because of financial support from Walter Salles, who not only declared Limite to be one of the main inspirations for his career, but also included several direct references to Peixoto in his movie Abril Despedaçado (Behind the Sun, 2001), on which I will comment below.

L'originale è qui:

http://sensesofcinema.com/2006/feature-articles/brazilian-cinema/