Limit (1931)
(Limite)
Country: BRA
Technical: bw 122m
Director: Mario Peixoto
Cast: Olga Breno, Tatiana Rey, Raul Schnoor, Brutus Pedreira
Synopsis:
Two women and a man float becalmed in a rowing boat with only one oar, a few biscuits and no water. As if in a delirium they are assailed by images of their former lives.
Review:
Or so most synopses of this classic avant-garde film have it, though arriving at any sensible exegesis is made problematic by the use of different actors for the land scenes! In a work clearly influenced by Buñuel/Dalí and Dziga Vertov (and looking ahead to Eisenstein and Béla Tarr!), Peixoto assembles a succession of formalist or textural images while utilising every tool in the film maker's handbook (montage, pans, tracks, Dutch angles, extreme or occluded close-ups, double exposure) to convey his ideas. Which are? Such intertitles as there are allude to frustrated love, but a clue lies in the title and we get shots of a girl in manacles, stunted trees, religion, fences, surf-swept shorelines and, in one particularly ethnic sequence, fishing nets. Most of these 'paragraphs' could do with having a fraction of the shot length, and fewer repetitions, for the results are tedious and oppressive, save for a sequence from Chaplin's The Adventurer at a cinema in which one of the characters plays the piano. The soundtrack meanwhile, based on the original recording notes, is provided by a selection of early twentieth century classics (Satie, oddly effective at half speed, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky), all equally repetitive and often intrusive in Un chien andalou fashion.
(Limite)
Country: BRA
Technical: bw 122m
Director: Mario Peixoto
Cast: Olga Breno, Tatiana Rey, Raul Schnoor, Brutus Pedreira
Synopsis:
Two women and a man float becalmed in a rowing boat with only one oar, a few biscuits and no water. As if in a delirium they are assailed by images of their former lives.
Review:
Or so most synopses of this classic avant-garde film have it, though arriving at any sensible exegesis is made problematic by the use of different actors for the land scenes! In a work clearly influenced by Buñuel/Dalí and Dziga Vertov (and looking ahead to Eisenstein and Béla Tarr!), Peixoto assembles a succession of formalist or textural images while utilising every tool in the film maker's handbook (montage, pans, tracks, Dutch angles, extreme or occluded close-ups, double exposure) to convey his ideas. Which are? Such intertitles as there are allude to frustrated love, but a clue lies in the title and we get shots of a girl in manacles, stunted trees, religion, fences, surf-swept shorelines and, in one particularly ethnic sequence, fishing nets. Most of these 'paragraphs' could do with having a fraction of the shot length, and fewer repetitions, for the results are tedious and oppressive, save for a sequence from Chaplin's The Adventurer at a cinema in which one of the characters plays the piano. The soundtrack meanwhile, based on the original recording notes, is provided by a selection of early twentieth century classics (Satie, oddly effective at half speed, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky), all equally repetitive and often intrusive in Un chien andalou fashion.
(Limite)
Country: BRA
Technical: bw 122m
Director: Mario Peixoto
Cast: Olga Breno, Tatiana Rey, Raul Schnoor, Brutus Pedreira
Synopsis:
Two women and a man float becalmed in a rowing boat with only one oar, a few biscuits and no water. As if in a delirium they are assailed by images of their former lives.
Review:
Or so most synopses of this classic avant-garde film have it, though arriving at any sensible exegesis is made problematic by the use of different actors for the land scenes! In a work clearly influenced by Buñuel/Dalí and Dziga Vertov (and looking ahead to Eisenstein and Béla Tarr!), Peixoto assembles a succession of formalist or textural images while utilising every tool in the film maker's handbook (montage, pans, tracks, Dutch angles, extreme or occluded close-ups, double exposure) to convey his ideas. Which are? Such intertitles as there are allude to frustrated love, but a clue lies in the title and we get shots of a girl in manacles, stunted trees, religion, fences, surf-swept shorelines and, in one particularly ethnic sequence, fishing nets. Most of these 'paragraphs' could do with having a fraction of the shot length, and fewer repetitions, for the results are tedious and oppressive, save for a sequence from Chaplin's The Adventurer at a cinema in which one of the characters plays the piano. The soundtrack meanwhile, based on the original recording notes, is provided by a selection of early twentieth century classics (Satie, oddly effective at half speed, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky), all equally repetitive and often intrusive in Un chien andalou fashion.