Octávio de Faria. Nature and Rhythm

Nature and Rhythm (Natureza e Ritmo)

Octávio de Faria. Translated from Portuguese. Pages 7–9 of Cine-Clube. First published in O Jornal on 17 June 1931.

Even more than A Bagaceira, certain Russian films convinced me of their author’s thesis through the images of nature I saw in individual scenes: “What matters in landscape is to eliminate the commonplaces of nature.”

But if we take this thesis seriously, we must admit that it retains all its force where Brazilian cinema is concerned. Sated with the beauties of nature that our films mercilessly display, almost always presenting them as “picture postcards,” I can only rarely accept this nature of ours without irritation. A commonplace multiplied by an excessively finite number of combinations—both in reality and in the work of art. Nowhere is this felt as acutely as in cinema.

Mário Peixoto’s Brazilian film Limite is a decisive negation of all this. The impression made by good Russian films expands and reaches Brazil.

The author of A Bagaceira is entirely right: “What matters is to eliminate the commonplaces of nature.” Yet the question before us is how they may be eliminated. Only a true artist knows. Only the artist can choose from among a thousand possibilities the one unlike all the rest, the one that forms a marvellous combination, blends with no other, and will never recur.

Our films about “nature” failed because their directors lacked a genuinely artistic temperament. As a rule, nature was filmed only in what was conventionally considered beautiful: familiar views, obligatory official sights, and perhaps some new angle that happened to present itself at the moment.

We saw panoramas; we saw Corcovado and Sugarloaf Mountain dozens of times. We saw several interesting views. Yet the impression was always the same: a familiar landscape as an unchanging background on which new details appeared here and there. That is quite enough to condemn nature once and for all as the governing element of our films.

From this point of view, Limite is a true revelation in our milieu. It contains not a single scene of nature that was not filmed after careful study of its aesthetic meaning. One cannot really say that this particular house door, this particular advancing wave, this solitary tree or passing cloud was filmed. From a thousand possibilities, the one necessary possibility was chosen. It was so completely “torn from nature” that nothing else could replace it.

Nature cannot, in fact, remain beautiful and interesting without interruption; if it did, it would immediately risk becoming commonplace. Nature has its “moment.” Among the thousand and one guises in which the things of the world appear to our gaze in any place, one—or only a few—truly expresses something singular, something extraordinary that justifies the ordinary person’s wonder before nature. This is the moment when nature is genuinely “fortunate.”

The ability to seize this moment, to feel the combination that most fully expresses everything aesthetically valuable within it, distinguishes Limite from everything previously attempted in Brazilian cinema. It also brings the film remarkably close to those Russian works whose individual scenes provoked noisy outbursts of enthusiasm from sophisticated audiences.

Ordinarily, when filmmakers set out to photograph nature, they record its first available appearance together with all its other appearances, in all its moments—the “fortunate” and the commonplace alike. Where one remarkable coconut palm grows amid countless unremarkable objects, the usual method would be to film everything: a general view of the area in which the palm would naturally appear, perhaps surrounded by other palms of no interest. A photographer would already be considered good if he managed not to lose sight of that particular palm and somehow drew attention to it.

Modern cinema—the most “unprejudiced” thing humanity has ever seen—taught the lesson of camera angle and revealed the absurdity of such a conception. Limite, one of the most “unprejudiced” films I have seen, would therefore film not the whole area but only the significant palm. If necessary, it would film it from above, for as a work of “modern cinema” it conveys the impression that any placement of the camera is possible.

Limite films the palm from below because it is precisely from below, from this angle and no other, that it perfectly expresses what the film’s design requires of it.

In this way, Limite strives to extract from every scene everything it can yield. It uses the scene not only as an aesthetic element but also as a bearer of meaning in a filmic development entirely governed by rhythm.

In the shot of the coconut palm, as in every other scene, we must distinguish the “aesthetic element” from the “element of meaning.” Through the first, the palm’s natural beauty is used as fully as possible in each scene. The second gives way to another element belonging to the following scene and lasts for a particular duration. The rhythm of Limite arises from the relation between these two factors: from the succession of images and the duration of each.

Limite seems to me to be distinguished by a constant opposition between the aesthetic element and the element of meaning. If the film has a defect as spectacle rather than as an object of study, it is, paradoxically, the very quality that gives it its greatest cinematic interest: the coexistence in every scene of two equally powerful tendencies which the weakness of human perception prevents us from fully reconciling. The director himself, I think, is more sensitive to the artistic aspect of a scene than to its semantic value. What is insignificant as a defect reveals his “manner” and explains his individuality as a filmmaker.

The scene before us constantly prevails over the unfolding action. More precisely, the film’s “becoming”¹ is repeatedly interrupted in its continuity by an artistic instant that wishes to stop and fix itself within the work of art. The scene continually strives to become an end in itself, thereby revealing its aesthetic value both as a part and as an autonomous whole.

This is not a defect. It is, first of all, a coexistence of virtues. It becomes a defect only because it demands an effort of which the human mind is rarely capable. Limite demands from the viewer the same artistic feeling, the same understanding, the same simultaneous perception of rhythm and pictorial beauty as its creator possesses. It is an artist’s work addressed to an artist.

To love Limite one truly needs a measure of artistic feeling. But to understand completely what in its realization goes beyond the ordinary requires a special receptiveness: the capacity to grasp the real difference between two crests of waves appearing a few seconds apart and almost indistinguishable to an ordinary gaze; the habit of seeing cinema as art. It is a film for initiates, and only initiates will understand it.

If the aesthetic element of each scene is governed by the desire to use that scene as fully as possible, then within the element of meaning it is rhythm that gives the scenes their significance. This may be the film’s greatest originality. The unity of its rhythm determines the meaning of the “incidents” it recounts, joining and fusing them into a single story. Anyone insensitive to cinematic rhythm will remain remote from the meaning these incidents acquire.

In this respect, I have seen only a few equally unforgettable passages—in The Living Corpse (Cadáver vivo). There, a single living rhythm stands in complete opposition to a rapid rhythm; Limite, by contrast, deliberately seeks the slowness suggested to its creator by the “incident” itself.

Rhythm binds the scenes together and animates each image, expressing in itself even more than the image’s content. Only the slow rhythm with which the seamstress’s working tools are shown can express her state of mind, her weariness with a monotonous life. When her face then appears and expresses all this melancholy in a single movement, everything has already been said; what is said merely gains additional force.

This recurs throughout the film. The scene in itself—like the actors, of whom it is scarcely worth speaking—recedes and fades before the rhythm that carries it. Images become the true units from which the director constructs his “montage.” Paradoxically, no film has avoided absolute visual continuity so consistently, although all its work is based on the camera’s continuous movement.

The film as a whole has no visual continuity, only separate scenes. Continuity is not the basis of the film’s design, but merely of the realization of certain “images.” Here the “montage” of Russian cinema emerges: images of greater or lesser duration, depending on the length of the shot and on the movement of the camera following the action.

With these images of different “sizes,” so to speak, the director orchestrates the film. From beginning to end, the duration of every image is mathematically calculated. No prior knowledge is needed to understand this; one need only see the film, for otherwise the entire work would be badly constructed at its foundation. A graph of Limite would undoubtedly astonish many viewers who still imagine cinema to be merely the photographing of scenes, yet such a graph can readily be conceived. I see it without sharply marked bends, full of circles, balanced, existing wholly in relation to a central line.

That axis is not the boat in which the film begins and ends and where the characters’ scattered destinies converge, as one might initially suppose. It is, rather, the “rhythm of the boat.” The distinction is so essential that it alone is enough to set Limite against any other film ever made.

When the characters recount their lives on solid ground, the strict unity of rhythm allows us to feel that the “rhythm of the boat” has been transferred ashore and continues to be “present” in every incident they narrate.

The cinematic effect thereby produced is truly extraordinary. If I am not mistaken, it realizes what so fascinated Russians and French filmmakers in their conceptions of sound cinema: the possibility of evoking a state of mind, a preceding situation, directly within the scene we are watching. One scene calls another to mind. The rhythm governing each scene is the same rhythm running through the entire film. Transferred ashore, the rhythm of the boat accompanies the account of events and is present at every moment. At a moment of profound dejection in the story of one character or another, we feel the dejection of the boat. Yet if a joyful moment arrives, the dejection of the boat, before which all joy must bow, remains present: it recalls the ending, continuously and inexorably, tracing at every instant the boundaries within which every state of mind not belonging to the boat may change.

In Limite, rhythm at every moment restricts the possible independence of each scene’s meaning. This “presence” warns us: do not believe in this happy union, this work, or this walk. All are unstable and transitory, because the despair of these unfortunate people will only grow and will inevitably lead them to the boat, where we see them together, wholly defined by this rhythm of anguish and despair.

All those who hastened toward sound cinema because they saw in it the possibility of making present and past coexist—or, more precisely, of making the past present within the present (Pudovkin’s entire “auditory evocation”)—will find here an answer that is at once a solution in purely cinematic terms. The answer concerns not only Brazilian cinema, which has not even posed the question and will not notice the response, but cinema in general.

The importance of Limite as a Brazilian film is great, but seems negligible to me beside its importance as a film in itself. We may now enter the avant-garde cinemas of Paris and discuss film using examples of our own.

Footnotes

1. In the phrase o “devenir” do filme, the French philosophical term devenir is rendered as “becoming.” ↩