The Symptom Limit

Abstract

This is about proposing an innovative reading of the film Limite (1931), which is considered one of the most important films in Brazilian cinema. The great critical fortune formed around the film usually emphasizes the metaphysical nature of its concerns: the “limit” of which the title speaks would be the tragic fate of the human being of being trapped in time and unable to escape it. The reading proposed here seeks to move away from this metaphysical dimension by mobilizing the concept of symptom, used by contemporary French image theory, in order to think not about what the images show, but what they don't show. The aim is to make a reference to the fact that the city of Mangaratiba, where the film was shot, used to receive slave ship landings in the 19th century, promoted by the family of Limite's director, the Breves family. Thus, the theme of time will be approached from 3 overlapping temporal layers: temporal suspension, which indicates the aesthetic intention of creating an indeterminate space-time; historical time, which will try to find elements that denounce the fact that it was filmed in the city of Mangaratiba in 1930 and finally ancestral time, which refers to the memory of slavery that remains an invisible element in the film.