Limite
Vinicius de Moraes. Translated from Portuguese from the note on page 6 of Cine-Clube. Originally published in the newspaper A Manhã, circa 1941–1942.
None of those who came to the small gathering in the Municipal Information Service screening room on Tuesday suspected the true cinematic power of Mário Peixoto’s film, although it was already twelve years old. Twelve years in the young art of cinema is already the past.
No one. I watched people enter in good spirits but without the slightest concentration. There was no excited murmur. Orson Welles laughed with his friend and adviser La Guardia. Five or six people present already knew the film and were enthralled by it. Limite always comes as a surprise. I had already seen it twice, yet it revealed itself to me as something new.
The atmosphere in the room was smooth as the surface of a lake. As soon as the screening began, I sat beside Orson Welles and watched for about fifteen minutes. Then I got up and walked around the room, sitting now beside one person and then another: I wanted to observe the reactions of people who, I knew, watched films in different ways. Little by little I felt a series of concentric circles forming—as when a stone sinks into water—spreading ever wider the interest that had seized the room. Then I too became lost in the film. Limite is an anfíguri, an enigma touching the limits of perfect intuition. Cinema continually intrudes upon sequence. Its rhythm is at times broad, unfolded in long shots, and at times dizzying; yet it never disperses, and the image serves as only its most minimal conductor. The image is the great force present: through its inner rhythm and the rhythm of succession, it continually sets new tasks before the viewer’s imagination. Never has there been a film so charged—I use the word in its electrical sense—with meaning, expressiveness, and unspoken things; a film that never reveals anything completely and leaves everything at the “limit”: reason beside sensuality, madness beside logic, poetry beside the thing itself.
This is the great virtue of Limite as cinema, as a form of knowledge beyond knowledge. The film throws not the slightest bridge toward the viewer. It draws the viewer into the adventure of their own understanding. And what a thrilling adventure it is! I deliberately invited two or three people wholly unversed in cinema—true representatives of the general public. Their reaction was the best of all. They did not “understand” everything, they said, but the image’s ability to speak for itself moved them deeply. I am convinced that any audience can be prepared to love Limite. Everything depends on critical persuasion. People everywhere possess the ability to love good art; the question is merely to present it as art.
I am trying to arrange one more small screening of Limite before the major presentation that will soon take place at the Metro Passeio cinema. The cinema has kindly made its excellent auditorium available for a full screening. Everything will be announced in due course. I believe that everyone should see Limite and speak—well or badly—about what is new in its contribution to Brazilian cinema. All the more so because it is time to begin a serious campaign for good cinema in Brazil: we must now work on our own culture in order to resist any sense of dread or tense anticipation before the world.
Translator’s Note
In the original, the film is called an anfíguri: an intentionally nonsensical, obscure, or enigmatic statement. We retain the Portuguese word in the main text because no single English equivalent preserves its strangeness. The English word meaning also appears in English in Vinicius de Moraes’s original. In the image of widening circles, the scan appears to read ao mergulhar de uma pedreira (“as a quarry sinks”); the intended sense is probably a stone entering water, which is reflected in the translation.