Limite

Long thought lost, the Brazilian experimental film, Limite (apparently pronounced "Li mee chee") was reconstructed from elements discovered in 2007.  In its day, the early 1930's, the picture was highly regarded -- it was praised by Orson Welles and said to be admired by Sergei Eisenstein.  (We now know that an effusive article published in London and attributed to Eisenstein was, in fact, authored by the movie's director, Mario Peixoto.)  The movie is nearly impenetrable but striking and employs disconcerting techniques not ventured in cinema, so far as I know, until Godard.  As is the case with many avant garde productions, history never caught up with Limite's expressive innovations and the picture represents a cul-de-sac -- Peixoto wrote poems and published criticism but he never made another movie (although apparently not for want of trying).  The film is too daunting to have been popular with anyone but intellectuals of the most rarefied order and the movie, although stylistically brilliant, didn't found a school and has no imitators.  (Some of the peculiar stylistic features of the film -- for instance, an emphasis on close shots of people's feet and legs as they walk are characteristic of the movies made by Robert Bresson, the great French director; but Peixoto's film doesn't seem to have influenced the later movie-maker; Bresson's predilection for showing people's feet when they walk or run is an independent invention.)  Because the film is Brazilian, weirdly non-narrative, unseen even by most cinephiles and made as a silent picture -- although it has a florid score featuring Debussy, Franck and other late Romantic composers -- it's a dead end.  The sort of  histrionic acting that the movie uses, it's montage effects, and high-contrast black-and-white, sometimes used in negative form, are all characteristics of a late twenties avant-garde that died out without producing much in the way of successors; sound film engendered a different kind of avant-garde, although some aspects of Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon superficially resemble imagery and photographic practices in Limite.    

After an image of vultures squabbling on a rock, the movie begins with a series of shots showing an open boat sweltering in glassy motionless water.  A woman sits upright at the front of the boat, gazing into the silky smooth distance.  A man is slumped in the middle of the boat, bent over an immobile oar.  A woman, who seems to be either dead or asleep, rests at the back of boat.  The image resembles Eakins with reflections cast upon the still water.  The boat seems to be far out at sea -- there's no land visible on the horizon.  The film explores this curious tableaux from various angles, including ultra close-ups of the two women and the man in the boat.  Then, the movie cuts to a woman seemingly behind some kind of barred window.  Various close-ups, some hard to interpret, show the woman reaching through the bars and a lock being opened.  The camera, then, tracks behind the woman as she emerges from the building and walks down a shabby-looking street that has the typical closed-off and enigmatic appearance of a Latin American residential neighborhood, all crumbling walls with no  windows.  Close-ups feature the woman's legs and feet as she walks away from what we learn later is a jail.  (Someone is reading a newspaper in which an article about a jail-break is featured.)  As the woman advances into the landscape, she leaves the town and the road becomes a pale country lane -- these shots have a tremendous sense of presence and the landscape seems to brood heavily over the rural thoroughfare.  The woman turns away to the left, but the camera ignores her motion and continues to advance along the road for a dozen yards or so before turning to the left where we expect to see the character -- instead, the camera shows a desolate field of cut sugar cane with shaggy dark mountains hanging over the sharp-looking stubble in the foreground.  The camera, then, tracks back without a cut to where the woman is discovered apparently despairing and slumped over a kind of turnstile leading into the sugar cane field.   The forward motion of the camera after the woman has moved to the left and, apparently, just bent down over the turnstile is one of the most spectacularly pointless camera maneuvers that I have ever seen -- this sort of thing would not be done until Godard's Weekend, thirty five years later, a film in which some scenes feature an untethered camera that more or less wanders away from the figures that it is supposed to be filming.  Limite, then, shows us a series of enormous close-ups of enigmatic objects -- they turn out to be scissors and other equipment used in the garment industry.  A woman is working on sewing something.  After many shots of her labor, often cubist in their appearance, we see this woman move from the dark cubicle where she is working and out onto the same ghostly and deserted lane where the other woman was walking -- it's obvious that these are the two women from the boat although whether these are flash-backs or flash-forwards or merely abstract formal interpolations is unclear.  The movie encourages us to read the images as narrative but we don't have any sense for the plot that we are shown.  There's a huge close-up of a painfully dying fish intercut with images of the man and two women becalmed at sea.  The dying fish turns out to be in a fish-market where the sewing woman is getting groceries -- she carries a bag back to a dismal-looking house where the young man from the boat, still completely morose and inert is sitting on the steps waiting for her.  These shots are interrupted by a repeated image of the camera rapturously swinging up to peer at a rivulet of water trickling from a dark hole in pylon.  (It seems to be some kind of fountain).  The sad young man turns out to be a pianist who plays in a local movie theater -- in fact, we see him tickling the ivories during a Chaplin film featuring the star as a criminal clawing  his way out of the earth to escape f rom a prison.  This image reminds us that one of the women has somehow escaped from some kind of jail.  (Somehow, the movie manages to make the Chaplin movie look sinister and bleak.)  Many of the shots are cut together in ways that don't match -- for instance, one of the women (you can't really tell them apart) meets the man in the middle of the sunbaked street; there's a low-angle shot showing them in a confrontation with a huge utility pole towering between them.  But other shots don't show the utility pole at all -- the editing suggests an encounter but the topography of the meeting between the man and woman changes according to the camera angle.  In one shot, a woman looks out over the bay with a picturesque clump of yucca in the foreground.  But other shot don't show the yucca at all or we see the distinctive plant somewhere completely different from its location suggested in what appears to be the "master shot" of the woman and the terrain around her.  Two lover are walking down the dusty lane in the twilight -- the camera suddenly forgets about them and drifts to the side to show a flower, and not even a particularly impressive flower (it's more like a tattered dandelion).  This sort of thing is startling and, at times, the film seems to anticipate the mise-en-scene in Terence Malick's films, a battle scene suddenly interrupted while the camera scrutinizes a butterfly or an orchid that just happens to be at the edge of the action.  The malaise on the open boat seems to be getting worse.  The boat is now leaking.  Two young men meet in a barren cemetery -- the scene seems to have homosexual implications but, ultimately, one of the young men accuses the other of "possessing a woman who is not (his) own".  There are no clues as to what is going on between the men -- one of them has removed a wedding ring from  his hand but we don't know why.  Everyone in the picture looks like everyone else -- the young men are wearing eerily identical suits, although one guy has very neatly combed hair and the other man sports an unruly mop a bit like Eisenstein's coiffure.  As the men walk away from the cemetery, one following the other, the camera whips through some underbrush in a dizzying blur, a shot repeated maybe five or six times.  There's a woman on a broken down pier and she's contemptuously eating something and, perhaps, spitting out seeds.  Who is she?  One of the young men confronts the sneering woman.  Then, we see the ecstatically spinning landscape of underbrush again, but this time slowed down so we can pick out individual twigs and branches.  One of the men has soiled his suit by staggering through a muddy lagoon -- his legs and dress shoes look filthy.  A long sequence follows in which the man walks from place to place viewed through two open windows in a building next to the luxuriantly wooded bay -- the shot exists merely to show that the figure can be seen from different perspectives from the water-side structure (appearing as black frames around the outdoor scene shown through the two window openings).  The man collapses next to a barb wire fence and the camera inspects the wires and their barbs and, then, noodles around in the sky for a minute or so, picturing various cloud formations. About six minutes of turbulent water follows,  shots showing waves seeming to smash into one another and, then, we are back on the boat of misery, now obviously sinking -- the man leaps into the sea and vanishes.  There's more shots of rolling sea and, then, the camera shows us the woman in white clinging morosely to a spar.  The little boat has also vanished.  The film ends as it began with the mysterious shot of the woman glaring at the camera and raising her gilded handcuffs (they look like jewelry) up to the camera.  There's a shot of sun spangling water and, then, the film's opening image:  sinister-looking vultures in silhouette gathered on top of a rock.  

Although the viewer waits for a narrative to emerge from these materials, Peixoto steadfastly withholds anything like a plot.  Indeed, it becomes evident (I can't say "clear") that the images in the film don't really  illustrate a story, but, instead, are ciphers for emotional states -- apparently, images for depression, a sense of entrapment, the water representing turbulent, if unidentified emotions.  The boat, at first seems to be the sequel of some kind of shipwreck but gradually is revealed as an allegory for emotional stasis or paralysis.  (It may be, of course, that the woman in white has lured her unfaithful lover and his girlfriend out onto the sea to destroy them -- but we don't ever see her taking any hostile action and this is just conjecture;  indeed, the man voluntarily leaps overboard and we don't know what happened to the other woman.)  Possibly, the film has something to do with the cinema itself and the way that it shapes our expectations:  toward the end of the movie, a man is shown in a repeated scene buying a ticket, apparently to the movie theater -- this would seem to be someone other than the pianist who plays for the silent shows (wouldn't he be admitted free of charge?)  It's hard not to see in this shot some suggestion that the audience has been duped -- they have bought a ticket expecting to see a juicy melodrama involving two women fighting for a Latin lover and, instead, are treated to two-hours plus of giant closeups (in one shot, we literally peer up the nose of the woman), seascapes, and the melancholy deserted fishing village in the cove.  The Chaplin film briefly projected in the movie house implies certain expectations that the film seems conceived to thwart.  Everyone is engaged in some kind of flight, a sort of prison-break from the constraints of narrative.  The idea seems to be that Peixoto, instead of a narrative, simply provides us with the turbulent emotions that would accompany such a story -- the story is suppressed and what we see are its emotional values, the traces that it might leave on our feelings.  

The film is impressive, mostly clear, although there's about a five minute sequence close to the beginning convulsed by celluloid decay.  Limite had no commercial run -- it was too puzzling to be shown in Brazilian cinemas.  The picture was projected by various film clubs for many years, but gradually rotted away -- the nitrate film stock ended up decomposed into illegibility.  It took three years for the movie to be restored with funds from the Martin Scorsese World Cinema Foundation (the work was done by Cinema Ritrovatta in Bologna).  Like most experimental films, Limite seems far too long and suffers from an inflated sense of its own importance.  But it is an unusual film and beautifully made and worth, I think, puzzling over.