In the beginning, a few birds are resting on the rock overlooking the sea.  The camera shoots them with low-angle, and the birds present a mere representation of forms of birds.  Superimposition of a womans face and male hands in cuffs follows, which already gives the feeling of being trapped.  The camera then shoots the hands in cuffs in close-up, and it dissolves to an extreme close-up of her face, which frames just her eyes.  Another dissolve to the surface of the ocean follows, which resembles the texture of her skin with moving lights reflecting the sun.  The camera cuts back to the womans close-up, and the story begins with a high-angle shot of Woman1, and then the crane shots of each character respectively.  The camera draws back to show the boat drifting in the vast ocean, which emphasizes the solidarity three characters share. 

Decades before the Cinema Novo movement hit its peak in Brazil, the ambitious nineteen-year-old director Mario Peixoto made Limite upon his return from extensive travels to Europe, mainly to France and England (Stam 309). Without the fact that it was made by Brazilian filmmaker, the film could easily be taken as a masterpiece of early European avant-garde cinema.  Just like many Dada films, the film was shot on location as if to provoke the public; many free association montages are used to create surrealistic moments, and industrial shots very much remind the viewers of Vertovs Man With a Movie Camera.  Although it seems somewhat apolitical and unclear in plot, Calros Diegues writes that even this naiveté is valid, for Cinema Novo is, above all, freedom.  In making Limite, Peixoto experimented and challenged the conventional narrative story telling and communication with the audience.  Through the fragmentation of his cinema language and self-reflexivity written out in the sequence of film-within-film of Chaplins comedy, he also asks us, after more than seventy years, what the cinema is.

In this paper, I will draw special attention to cinematography and the over-all structure of the film, and discuss the directors unique voice in which he tells a human condition through cinematic images.

The film is edited in a way that three personages look back their life, and that each story is told very differently from each other. The reason why these three people ended up in the same boat is never made clear, and the story of Woman1 (light-haired) starts.  The image is unstable, and is heaving with the wave.

The Woman1 is shown trapped in an iron cage in all-black uniform.  She argues with a man, who could be a guard, and walks off.  The camera, which is close to the ground, shows her moving away, and moves shooting along eaves. A traveling shot follows the trees and the sunlight filtering through.  All these scenes are presenting the view from below, which conveys the woman's wanting to escape to a higher plane. Now the camera starts to move as if to have its own will.  After shooting her from 360-degrees, not only does it follow her walking, it sees what is around, just like a documentary film does.  This subjective camera movement strongly draws attention to the existence of somebody behind the camera, and creates a tone of realism to the shots.  Here, the audience is not a mere spectator any more, but becomes actively engaged in her life. 

The waves of the ocean seem a little bigger now, and the music playing is an agonizing melody.  The bucket in the boat is empty.  The music changes to a comical and mysterious one, and the camera shoots a close-up of a fish on the sand, taking its last breaths through gills.  The audience realizes that the filming style has changed.

Shots of buildings, a boat, and a street in strange angles follow.  A stream of water is pouring from a pipe, and the camera repeats the fast zooms, as if to show the thirst of the Woman2 (dark curly haired).  The repetitive shots also create a fast rhythm, and the lens moves over to the rooftop erratically.  After she shops on the beach, she returns straight to her house.  As she nears the house, both the camera and her footsteps slow down, and the music turns mellow as well.  She enters the house, and the camera shoots the entrance.  The audience feels like it also should be waiting at the door until she comes out again, because the image stays there for a little while.  This banal shot of the door brings a voyeuristic feel to the following shots, as if the audience is not supposed to know what happens inside.  The depressed husband sits at the top of the stairs, and she hesitates even to walk up. The camera from both extreme low and high angles from the bottom and the top of the stairs show the distance between them.  The audience is still at the doorway.  She opens, and comes out without a basket in her hands.  She chats with her neighbor, and keeps walking. 

On the country road, a little girl is playing with a puppy; the woman approaches and squats down to play with them.  Here, the camera does not go close to show them talking in close-ups. Instead, it makes a turn to show one tiny white flower swinging in the wind at the roadside.  By all means, this is one of the greatest shots in this film.  It does not cut to the close-up of the flower; it shows the movement connected from the shot of the womans back.  The audience experiences a sudden expansion and focus of the view on her life at the same time, and the sharp edge of the fence contrasts very much to the elegant, delicate flower. 

Now she sits at the edge of a huge rock, determining something.  The image shows what is below from her perspective, and the camera zooms into her face, which stretches in fear.  As if it is falling from an airplane, the camera tilts, rotates, and the mise-en-scene is all circling.  Trees and plants are shot from extreme angles, and the audience feels that she is on the verge of mental breakdown.  The visual images accentuate her lonely disconnection, and the little control over she has what is around her. Here, also the image of a fish signifies this woman in the audiences mind.

The last story is about the Man.  He is walking on the beach hand-to-hand with a woman (she is not either of the women I described previously).  The vast field and strange shapes of trees are there, and long shots of the two follow.  It is as if they are talking of a breakup, or at least, something very serious.  They take off their socks, shoes, and underwear, and go into the water.  Minutes later he carries her up to the land.  Compared to the other two females perspectives, the composition of the images are simple and dynamic, and images are of high contrast. 

The film brings the audiences back to the boat, and shows that the water is sinking into the boat.  Small wooden blocks floating in the puddle resemble the small boat drifting the vast ocean.

Next come the negative images of the previous mans visions, which depicts his inner torment and agony perfectly. Like this, Peixoto uses the same footages at a different moment in the film to create a new structure and meaning to them. Again, the plants and trees chosen here are constructed mainly from lines.  Those pointy plants may be the gothic buildings of Brazil.

At the doorway, the man kisses a womans hand, and she closes the door.  The camera superimposes his foot walking in search of an answer for something, with various landscapes.  Now wind blows rather strongly, and his steps are on messy but hard ground, where we cannot see his footprints any more unlike the footprints he left with a woman on the beach.  One way to look at this is that so many people and life have stepped on him, and now even he cannot find his own footprints or path any more.

The man walks towards the camera, picks up a cigarette, and enters the old ruin of a cemetery.  With dried up flowers in his hand, the camera follows his hands to where he finds one young man who is mourning at the graveside.  While his hair in close-up swings in the wind, the young mans hair is wet with gel and calmed neatly. Against the Mans messy hair, this shiny hair and the young mans overall appearance make the audience uneasy, as if the Man is now possessed by the Devil.

The young man asks for a light, but what he puts in his mouth is a wood piece.  Here the only title dialogue in the film is what appears to be this young mans accusing of the Man.  The sharp edge of the grave and two men standing intercut with each other, and the mysterious young fellow leaves. The music quickens, and he sets out again looking for something.  He shouts out, pushes aside the grasses of the field, and keeps moving.  The fast zooms to the shouting man are repeated from different angles, which gives a dramatic effect, and also shows his frustration with himself.  The abstract image, probably a traveling shot of trees, is repeated.  This only accelerates his chaotic inner conflict and dilemmas.

After a keen search in vain, he falls down on the ground, with his hand trying to reach for something.  The crosses from the graveyard and the images on the beach carry lonely images, but he is again shown walking.

The camera is now back to the ocean with all three in the picture.  Throughout the film, the Woman1 is by far the most hopeful, and regardless of the outcomes, she has always searched for an escape from her misery.  Midway through the film, when two other passengers just sit in despair, she picks up a pole and tries to row the boat not knowing where it is going.  She lies at the top of the boat, and starts to paddle with her hands. 

The ending is very open and somewhat vague.  The Man jumps into the sea to save somebody drawing.  Woman2 tries to stop him but he disappears into the water.  The shot from the surface of the water, and her crunching hands shows her inwardness, and her loss of the hope to start a new life.  Now, more water is coming into the boat, and the Woman1 sits still at the top.  Woman1 holds her heads and looks into the lens as if to ask for an opinion from the audience. 

The images of waves coming, going, mingling with each other, last for a while.  It works the surface into lather, the bubbles disappear eventually under the new waves, and the camera cuts to the calm surface of the ocean where Woman1 holds on to the remains of the boat and floats the sea.  The audience never knows what has happened to the other woman.  If the ocean is life, Woman1 finally seems to find where she is going: to live.

Now the beginning shot is repeated: the woman trapped in the cuffed hands, and the birds fly away. I take this scene as a positive remark on people in Brazil.  The situation has not changed a bit from the beginning.  The black birds, however, are no more, and it implies that the time has passed.  The ocean, life, and what is from outside will always trifle human condition, yet it is up to the individual what to make out of what she has, or how to deal with it.

Like I have been briefly describing, all three stories are told through visual cinematic languages created by Peixoto himself.  In that sense, like Glauber Rocha writes on the history of Cinema Novo, he is experimenting on his own revolutionary voice in depicting the people, not imitating what comes from the West or reproducing them. (280 et al.) There are places, which are hard to follow, but the film is full of life and after seventy years, it still challenges the notion of what cinema is, and how it communicates human conditions with viewers. 

The audience realizes that none of the characters are hero-type, and each person faces the boundary of life, love, and emotion (therefore the title Limite). While it does not consciously deal with the social-political situation of Brazil at that time, the years to come after the 1929 stock market crash is somehow drawn into the characters and visual images. 

The film tells that speaking out is not the only way to the establishment of national, individual cinema, and production with probably low-budget and limitation is an aesthetic of all the filmmaking against film as a business.