Recently I saw "Limite" at the BAM rose cinema in Brooklyn. A movie that since its creation in 1931 was never released to the public. It was the first movie ever made made by -then- 19 year old Brazilian Mario Peixoto, who never managed to finish any movie afterward until his death in 1992. This is from the opening scene:
It is almost impossible to grasp what the 19 year old man had accomplished -at least technically- in 1931: The movie has long uninterrupted tracking shots in the middle of the sea, unconventional camera positioning and close ups, non-linear narrative ... etc. Peixoto must have been a technical genius, many years ahead of everybody else: he built special camera supports for fluid 360 degree motion and long tracking shots, manipulated the lens optics to achieve fast "crisp" zoom effect for close ups...etc.
The movie opens with three young persons (a man and two women) in a small boat in the middle of nowhere. It will take some 20 minutes into the movie to realize that all "water" scenes relate to the present while the "land" scenes relate to the past of each character. There is no demarcation between the past and the present (very daring for 1931). The story is revealed progressively with almost no dialogue (dialoque screens can be counted on one hand over the 2-hour long movie) and we get to know why each character had grown tired of his/her own life. In a surprising (for 1931) way, the director would conclude the movie after two hours with no hints of how these people ended up on one boat after they reached the "limite" of their tolerance for life. Does the boat and the ocean really exist? or is it a metaphor for loss and despair? the dream-like quality of the images in mid ocean support the fact that this is just a dream (a nightmare) that the three total stranger are sharing, or "converging to" this one inevitable end: death ?
Even the conclusion of the movie is widely open-ended (again, this was 1931), the man chose to jump into the water and swim (and will never be shown after that) right before a storm hit the boat (the storm smartly suggested by close ups on waterfalls and waves) leaving one woman on a piece of floating wood (while the other one is totally not mentioned!).
Style-wise the movie is a lesson in symmetry, the opening and concluding shots are similar, just like the accompanying Satie (amongst other) music. The director at times opens a shot by very close zooms on objects (scissors, light poles....), few decades before Antonioni did that.
In Cinema there are movies that will never be touched by time, its quality will never be diminished, simply because they overcame the limitation of time and genre. Movies like Mirror, The Seventh Seal, Satantango will be watched and will be perceived with the same strength they evoked when they were first made. Limite is NOT one of those; just like Metroplois, Battleship Potemkin, Citizen Kane...etc its own importance is heavily based on it being an avant-guarde work that sooner or later would become the norm for plenty of mainstream movies.
Limite is an absolute must see, it is one of the best silent movies ever made.. and by itself it is an excellent work.
