Limite (1931)

Not rated.  It's an early (if not the first) truly experimental film.  As such, it's hard to discuss such things as narrative issues.  Everything is about the image with this movie.  As such, there's nothing visual that could be considered offensive.  Because there is a shred of a story kind of running in the background of the movie, I do have to point out that someone is having an affair, but very little could be considered explicit.  

DIRECTOR: Mario Piexoto

I am burdened with having too much ambition (and other modest things that one starts a blog with).  The school year is around the corner.  I have a million goals that I want to accomplish, all of them self-imposed.  But the frustration of the day is that Limite needs to be discussed (again, completely self-imposed).  I can't imagine giving up this blog at this point.  I've been writing it for almost a decade at this point and it is such a sense of accomplishment having written as much as I have, but I also have other things that I want to do.  Also, I honestly don't know what I'm going to say about Limite.  I thought of a good stinger for it.  Okay, I thought of a subpar, but usable stinger.  "This movie pushed my good will past its Limite."

Honestly, when Criterion embraces completely experimental films, it's a bit of a chore.  I established with Revenge that the Martin Scorsese set is becoming a bit like homework, I'm really talking about Limite.  Academically, I get what what Limite brings to the cinematic canon.  It may be the first full length experimental film (although I doubt when I read that if it is true or not).  Heck, I even argue if it's completely an experimental film because there is the tiniest narrative running through the images on screen.  Do I think it's experimental?  Absolutely. You'd have a hard time finding people to disagree with that.  But one of the things that I realized quite early on that it is almost the responsibility of the viewer to ignore the narrative.  I know.  The movie creates paradoxical attitudes. For the first half, I really tried to follow the limited story going on.  I needed Wikipedia to help with this, by the way.  When I paid attention to the narrative, I gave specific value to images and motifs flowing throughout the picture.  But soon, I found myself judgmental about a limited narrative and wasn't getting the experience that Piexoto probably wanted from me.  So then I started watching it as a collection of images coupled with a soundtrack that does an incredible amount of heavy lifting.  It got me in mood, but I also felt like I was missing the purpose of the movie.  

Sure, there's probably a natural balance out there.  I mean, that's what cinema is.  It's the role of the audience to determine investment and it's not like I got nothing out of Limite. Earnestly, most of the imagery, especially for a movie from 1931, is darned impressive.  (Sure, I wish that Martin Scorsese didn't tell me about the bookended imagery and that it was just a copy of an ad.) It's a gorgeous movie and I can't even slightly pretend that it wasn't mostly impressive as could be.  But also, the movie becomes so meditative that I almost felt like I wasn't watching the movie.  There were three seconds where I had to turn away from the screen.  With silent movies, there's a special amount of intense concentration that is needed because everything comes from the visual part of the film.  But I realized, despite looking away for three seconds, I wasn't missing anything.  At one point, I realized that I wasn't really paying attention to anything.  There were long sequences of repeated imagery.  For about three solid minutes, we were just shown water.  It was pretty water, that was to be sure.  But it was just looking at water.  It was like someone chose to tell me what to meditate on as opposed to letting my mind drift to where it wanted to go.

It's not like the imagery was without purpose though.  If the movie was bookended with the image of the woman framed by handcuffs, the motif of incarceration --of one sort or another --did play throughout the film.  A lot of the movie is a juxtaposition between total freedom and being locked up.  The story, for what exists, shows the cast slowly perishing at sea.  Their prison is the water and each other.  But in their lives, from what I understand, there is something that is constraining them.  In some cases, as the woman shows, there is a literal prison that she escapes.  But the man is dealing with the imprisonment of an unjust marriage (from his perspective.  Methinks he dost protest too much.) Then there are transcendentalist ideas of escaping to nature.  Piexoto does all of these images of lush forests or high vistas and there is this automatic association with absolute freedom, which is ironic because the thing that is killing the characters is also nature.

Now, it is so unfair of me to criticize film techniques from 1931.  These are the people who are figuring out the language of film.  I have the benefit of having everyone else do the hard work and then I get to comment on it.  But for all of the beautiful techniques that Piexoto either discovers or adopts, there are some shots that are incredibly childish.  The one that bothers me less is the repetition shots.  I know.  There will be a rich history --especially in experimental film --to employ a repeated shot to pull an audience out of a grounded narrative.  Fine.  But there are moments where the film felt like watching a gif on repeat.  (At least the gifs I send are hilarious!)  But the thing that really bothered me is when Piexoto wanted to show chaos.

I'm going to give credit where credit is due when it comes to Piexoto's moving camera.  He does stuff that is insane for 1931.  But his chaos with the moving camera is dumb.  I'm sorry.  I know.  It's 1931 and he's trying stuff.   Normally, I would give the benefit of the doubt when it came to trying things out.  But why I find it frustrating is that there isn't much thought given to the spiraling camera.  Do you know why it irks me so much?  You hand any child a camera and tell them to make a movie, there's going to be a lot of that shot.  Sure, it gives the vibe of chaos.  But the most important thing about showing something that is out of control is that it has to look out of control while technically being in control.  This was just the cameraman doing what ever he wanted to do wtih that camera and it wasn't impressive in the least.  If anything, I felt like I was watching all of the footage on my iPhone after my kids got a hold of it.  Coupled with the fact that you have some absolutely perfectly crafted images, these moments kind of sully the surrounding footage.

90% of my gripes come from the fact that I don't typically love experimental film.  A movie can only shift into the avante-garde so much before my brain says "This is trying too hard."  It's the polar extremes that really bother me.  When a movie does nothing artistic, I get frustrated.  But get too artistic, and it almost feels like homework.  That's not an absolute thing.  There might be a certain mood where I would find Limite to be gorgeous.  But I kind of felt like I was watching more of a historical document than I was absorbing the movie with the intention that the director had when making it.