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 74th 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/
