Sometimes cited as the greatest of all Brazilian films, this silent experimental feature (1931) by novelist Mario Peixoto, who never completed another film, was seen by Orson Welles and won the admiration of everyone from Sergei Eisenstein to Walter Salles. But its status as a poetic narrativeabout a man and two women lost at sea in a rowboat, whose pasts are conveyed in flashbackshas kept it in the margins of most film histories, where its been known mainly as a provocative and legendary cult item. For Peixoto, the experience offered by Limite cannot be adequately captured by language, but was made to be felt. Therefore, the spectator should subjugate himself to the images as to anguished cords of a synthetic and pure language of cinema. According to the director, his film is meticulously precise as invisible wheels of a clock, where long shots are surrounded and linked by shorter ones as in a planetary system. Peixoto characterizes Limite as a desperate scream aiming for resonance instead of comprehension. The movie does not want to analyze. It shows. It projects itself as a tuning fork, a pitch, a resonance of time itself, capturing the flow between past and present, object details and contingence as if it had always existed in the living and in the inanimate, or detaching itself tacitly from them. Since Limiteis more of a state than an analysis, characters and narrative lines emerge, followed by a probing camera exploring angels, details, possibilities of access and fixation, only then to fade out back into the unknown, a visual stream with certain densifications or illustrations within the continues flow of time. According to Peixoto, all these poetic transpositions find despair and impossibilities; a luminous pain which unfolds in rhythm and coordinates the images of rare precision and structure
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