Maite Conde
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780520290983
- eISBN:
- 9780520964884
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520290983.003.0010
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter undertakes a close reading of the Brazilian experimental silent film Limite, made in 1930 by Mário Peixoto. It pays close attention to the context of the film’s production: Peixoto’s ...
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This chapter undertakes a close reading of the Brazilian experimental silent film Limite, made in 1930 by Mário Peixoto. It pays close attention to the context of the film’s production: Peixoto’s contact with the world of cinephilia in Brazil and his links to the European avant-garde. In doing so, it analyzes the film’s style in the light of Germaine Dulac’s emphasis on cinema’s visual rhythms. Rather than providing us with a story or even presenting us with the psychological state of mind among its characters, it shows how Peixoto’s film “thinks” in pictures, movements, and angles, trying to intertwine diverse visual fields by using certain symbolic themes and variations. The chapter this shows how Limite accomplishes what Dulac had demanded in 1927: the “real” filmmaker should “divest cinema of all elements not particular to it, to seek its true essence in the consciousness of movement and visual rhythms.”Less
This chapter undertakes a close reading of the Brazilian experimental silent film Limite, made in 1930 by Mário Peixoto. It pays close attention to the context of the film’s production: Peixoto’s contact with the world of cinephilia in Brazil and his links to the European avant-garde. In doing so, it analyzes the film’s style in the light of Germaine Dulac’s emphasis on cinema’s visual rhythms. Rather than providing us with a story or even presenting us with the psychological state of mind among its characters, it shows how Peixoto’s film “thinks” in pictures, movements, and angles, trying to intertwine diverse visual fields by using certain symbolic themes and variations. The chapter this shows how Limite accomplishes what Dulac had demanded in 1927: the “real” filmmaker should “divest cinema of all elements not particular to it, to seek its true essence in the consciousness of movement and visual rhythms.”
