I was quite shocked by everything in this film. It’s of a much higher scale, not only because of its formal boldness, but also because of its impressive inner cohesion, spiritual ambition and total surrender to the language of the sensorial. It’s as if the film rises not from a narrative intention but from an inner psychological impulse (symbolic rather than narrative) a gesture of expression that requires no cause or consequence, only rhythm, light, shadow and breath.

The young director Mário, astonishingly only twenty-one at the time, emerges from history as a prodigy who composed an eerily mature exploration of what I would call “cinema’s subterranean form,” a digging into time not as chronology, but as interiority. He constructs, with…

***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.***

"Three people sail aimlessly while remembering their past"... and so begins the most fascinating and breathtaking experimental film ever made by Brazil. Mario Peixoto must be one of the most mysterious filmmakers of all time, even more than F.W. Murnau, whose 8 films were completely destroyed. In the case of expressionist Peixoto, the film he directed in his career was Limite, and if this wasn't enough, a segment of Limite is already considered as totally lost. The length of the following review will be ultimately reduced because of its nature. It is a ride that must be left to the responsibility of the viewer. The point primarily consists in allowing…

This was definitely a film that pushes things to the limit and honestly really demands a rewatch cause it wasn't till the ending that I understood the whole narrative and grasped what the beginning was and I guess that makes it smartly inventive however it demands you to rationalize all that happened.
I can see it's appeal with it's eye on sharp visuals and a clever motif for editing from one image to be another as a transition but with very little dialogue it demands you to be very attentive of every scene and this is a 2 hour film so get that coffee pot brewing from the get go.
Obviously some of the material sifted through my eyes but…

Young Peixoto experiments, and almost disappears into his own liminal purgatory. Death has already arrived, and we are there together as humans, faintly, barely existing as such. Dream or a memory. Either way, it’s a trap, and Peixoto might accidentally create something extraordinary.

This film was born from a single image, and that image encapsulates the entire experience into one, unfortunately stretched into a rather tedious two hours that’s difficult to recommend to anyone beyond its historical significance. It’s lyrical without lyrics, a crown jewel of Brazilian film history that even Orson Welles admired, likely because of its mystique. Peixoto is an intriguing case, since this is his only work, and he even went as far as falsely (allegedly) claiming…

54/100

Might have loved this had Peixoto gone fully abstract-experimental à la Man With a Movie Camera; as is, "Intermittently astonishing!" would be my pull quote. There are shots here so unusual and inventive that I'm not sure whether they really "work," even as I found them thrilling. Best example sees the camera circle a woman on a deserted country road, then follow her from behind as she walks away, then continue past her as she exits frame on the left, then turn 90° to face the side of the road in the direction she went but still continue forward for a while (so it's now a tracking shot of fenceposts in the foreground and some trees in the background),…

Freedom. A voyage into an endless sea, only the past to hold you back. Cinema made to be cinematic, not merely a story or a formula. Limite is just a film of strange images, consisting of little else. Its narrative is vague and its purpose mysterious. Before sound was available to all, here comes a film made as an experiment, an alternative to convention, or perhaps made in ignorance of expectations. It has a purity to it, a mood that envelops all other aspects. Limite presents characters trying to escape the world, shackled by their previous lives. With almost no intertitles at all, Limite is dictated by changes in music, which alters the chronology and tone of scenes. Limite is…

Assim como os personagens dessa obra, seguimos atravessando um percurso contínuo de descoberta e desprendimento. Não há ganho em reagir com fúria ou tentar conduzir o barco à força. Há momentos em que o gesto mais lúcido é aceitar o ritmo das águas. É nesse abandono consciente que se desenha o limite entre o que somos e o que nos cerca, permitindo uma existência mais fiel ao essencial. Em Limite, a fragmentação da narrativa e a repetição de enquadramentos assumem papel fundamental na construção de uma atmosfera permanente de angústia que envolve duas mulheres e um homem, confinados a um barco à deriva. Presos não apenas ao espaço físico, mas também às próprias memórias, esses personagens carregam trajetórias fragmentadas, marcadas…

When he was 22 years old, the Brazilian Mário Peixoto would make his first film, an experimental silent feature film entitled LIMITE (1931). The film was inspired by an André Kertész photograph that Peixoto came across in 1929 while in Paris on the cover of issue 74 of the French weekly magazine "Vu." The image showed a woman looking into the camera with two male hands handcuffed around her neck.

There is little by the way of plot in the film but much of what happens revolves around a man and a woman in a boat and their individual histories. There are extreme close-ups, dissolves, fast cuts, and more that come together to form something that, according to the director…