In August 1929, Peixoto was in Paris, on a summer break from his studies in England, when he saw a photograph by André Kertész. The picture of two handcuffed male hands around the neck of a woman who was gazing at the camera became the 'generative' or 'Protean' image for Limite, in which a man and two women are lost at sea in a rowboat. Their pasts are conveyed in flashbacks throughout the film, clearly denoted by music. One woman has escaped from prison; another has left an oppressive and unhappy marriage; the man is in love with someone else's wife. The unusual structure has kept the film in the margins of most film histories, where it has been known mainly as a provocative and legendary cult film.
Peixoto wanted to play the male lead himself, and pitched the film to Brazilian directors Humberto Mauro and Adhemar Gonzaga, both of whom said that Peixoto's scenario was too personal to be played by anyone else. Peixoto decided to proceed, and paid for the production using family funds. He filmed in 1930 on the coast of Mangaratiba, a village about 50 miles from Rio de Janeiro, and where his cousin owned a farm. Stylistically, Limite follows a number of great 1920s directors: In his article on the film, critic Fábio Andrade notes the influence of D.W. Griffith, Soviet montage, the German Expressionist works of F.W. Murnau and Robert Wiene, French Surrealist shorts by Germaine Dulac and Man Ray, Robert J. Flaherty, Carl Theodor Dreyer and particularly Jean Epstein, all of which are visible in German-born Edgar Brasil's cinematography. One scene takes place at a screening of The Adventurer by Charlie Chaplin, suggesting another important influence on Peixoto's film.
Reception
Limite had three public screenings in Rio de Janeiro between May 1931 and January 1932, receiving little public support or critical acclaim. Its reputation built slowly: Vinicius de Moraes, who later became a prominent Brazilian poet and lyricist, showed the film to Orson Welles when he visited Brazil in 1942 to film parts of It's All True. Other screenings took place in private film societies, alongside works by Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, during the 1940s and early 1950s. Peixoto died in 1992, aged 83, leaving a substantial body of literary work, unproduced screenplays and scenarios, and a fragment of a planned second feature film, Onde a terra acaba, which never was completed and mostly lost in a fire. Peixoto continued to promote Limite, however, throughout his life. In 1965, he publicized an article about his film, apparently written by Eisenstein, praising its "luminous pain, which unfolds as rhythm, coordinated to images of rare precision and ingenuity." Peixoto was vague about the article's provenance, which lacked primary sources, claiming first that it appeared in Tatler and then an unidentified German magazine and finally admitted that he had written the text himself.
Preservation status
By 1959, the single nitrate print of Limite had deteriorated due to poor storage conditions and could no longer be screened, a situation that contributed to its near-mythical status in Brazilian film history. It was stored at the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia until 1966 when the military dictatorship's police force confiscated it, along with works by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and other Soviet directors. Former FNF student Pereira de Mello managed to retrieve the print, later that year; the restoration process began with photographic reproductions of every single frame, the basis for the most recent version, made with the assistance of the Mário Peixoto Archives and Cinemateca Brasileira, which had its American premiere in Brooklyn, New York on 17 November 2010, although a crucial scene remains missing. In 2017, the Criterion Collection issued Limite on DVD and Blu-Ray, as one of Martin Scorsese's selections for its World Cinema Project.
