There are recurrent bibliographical references to a supposed intellectual isolation of Mário Peixoto and Limite (1931) in the history of cinema, perhaps even in Brazilian cultural history. I would like to problematize these two affirmations in order to argue in favor of an approach to Limite that is different from the one taken due to its belonging to an experimental tradition, as well as a mapping of an intellectual and affective network to which Mário Peixoto belonged.
To do so, I start from a view that creates a dialogue between the cinema and other arts, especially literature, and to a lesser extent, the visual arts, and from a reading of the diaries of Mário Peixoto[1] and seventy testimonies from his relatives, friends, colleagues, and contemporaries held at the Mário Peixoto Archive in Rio de Janeiro. The testimonies total around at least 1500 pages. I believe that this unpublished material may contribute to expanding the knowledge not only of Mário Peixoto and his work, but also of the cultural history and intellect3ual scene of Rio de Janeiro, especially in the 1930s. For this purpose, my third hypothesis is to suppose another Modernism, in which extractivism, especially, associated with the “long decadence” of gold in Minas Gerais and, above all, with the decadence of coffee in the Paraíba Valley, is central and creates an aristocratic historical sensibility, without ceasing to be critical.
If there is a legacy, and not just monumentalization, it is because there have been scholars and artists who asked questions about what Modernism is, who enriched it in the extent to which they problematized it as a cultural movement[2]. I will not present different meanings of Modernism, but I ask myself what the purpose of Modernism is for Mário Peixoto and whether this Modernism might interest us today.
Mário Peixoto was born in 1908, was 14 years old in 1922, traveled to Europe in the late 1920s, and, in 1931, his only full-length film, Limite, is released, as well as his book of poems, Mundé[3], with an inside cover by Manuel Bandeira and a review by Mário de Andrade. A limited edition of his first novel, Inutil de Cada Um[4], was published in 1931 and another one released in 1935, a first volume of a fleuve roman with Proustian echoes that he would leave incomplete in its more than two thousand pages (also held at the Mário Peixoto Archive), as well as several never produced scripts and scattered texts (short stories, plays). Poemas de Permeio com o Mar[5], his second book of poems, is published after his death. His few articles were also posthumously collected in Escritos sobre cinema[6]. In a negative phase that recalls the life of the famous character Brás Cubas: Peixoto did not go to law school, like many of his contemporaries, he was not a journalist, he did not take a public position on the great themes that dilacerated the country and the intelligentsia during his long life, he did not reach celebrity status, or perhaps he did but very late, he did not marry, he was left with the good fortune and help of friends not to have to make an effort to buy the bread, the clothes, the shoes, and the glasses that he liked so much. A dandy, a man without a profession, under the care of his paternal grandmother while she lived, an amateur artist, an esthete for whom imagining, reading, and writing were more important than creating a work. He had no children, but he passed on the legacy of our misery.
Although the visibility and prestige of Limite only grew from the 1970s onwards, after its restoration, its more canonical reading placed it as an important reference for experimental cinema, and it is thus welcomed by Julio Bressane in O Experimental no cinema brasileiro[7] (1996) and studied in several articles, master’s theses, doctoral dissertations, and catalogs, but there are still few books about him, such as Limite[8] (1996), by Saulo Pereira de Mello, Jogos de Armar: a vida do solitário Mario Peixoto[9] (2000), by Emil de Castro, the sold-out Ten Contemporary Views on Mário Peixoto’s Limite, edited by Michael Korfmann[10] (2006), and my recent[11] Mário Peixoto antes e depois de Limite (2021). A smaller bibliography, due to the difficult access to the film that lasted until the 1970s, with less impact than, for example, that on Humberto Mauro[12] (Schvarzman 2004; Morettin 2013), just to mention who is perhaps the most well known and recognized filmmaker in the 1920s and 1930s.
The passage by Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes[13] in Humberto Mauro, Cataguases, Cinearte (1974) is significant: “The modernists from Cataguases, like those from all of Brazil, perhaps with the only exceptions of Mário de Andrade and Menotti Del Pichia, ignored national cinema, at the same time that Brazilian cinema at that time, with the exception of Mario Peixoto – also a modern poet – did not even know that Modernism existed.”[14] But of which Modernism could one speak in relation to Mário Peixoto? Here are a few questions. I found an exchange of brief messages preserved at the Cinemateca Brasileira (and so let us hope that it will continue) between Mário de Andrade and Mário Peixoto, but he does not seem to have had a strong relationship with the São Paulo modernists. Ismael Xavier[15], in “Modernismo e Cinema,” published in A Sétima Arte: um Culto Moderno (1978), when Limite was back in circulation, affirms that “in any case, the film produced in 1930 has a highly mediatized relationship with the modernism of the 1920s, and it is not possible to see it as something directly linked to the cinematic concerns of the movement’s participants”[16] (Xavier 1978, 153). Limite, continues Ismail Xavier, “due to the production date and isolation, confirms the lag between cinema and other sectors of our culture”[17] (Xavier 1978, 153). The affirmation of Limite’s isolation will persist, but I will try to take Ismail Xavier’s call made in the same book in another direction: “Let us hope that his aura does not now produce the same silent reverence that the myth of Chaplin produced in the theorists of Fan [a publication of the Chaplin Club]. And that the cult of its greatness does not make it an ‘indisputable’ film, almost impossible to access.”[18] In this sense, Limite’s isolation can and should be discussed if we consider it not only within a strictly cinematic tradition, but also in dialogue with literature, which was central to the definition of intellectual life at the time[19]. Limite can be understood not only from an experimental or avant-garde perspective, but also in the lineage of the chroniclers of the “murdered house,” a beautiful formulation by Sergio Miceli[20] in Intelectuais e a classe dirigente no Brasil (1920-1940), from 1979, inspired by the masterpiece of Lúcio Cardoso[21], who was also a friend of Mário Peixoto, in order to understand the modernists, but also in a more limited way as the staging of the murdered house, a constellation marked by the melancholy that cannot be reduced to a late crepuscularism amidst the explosions of Oswaldian joy. If we move away from the urban experience of Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, we find in small towns a past surrounded by ruins inhabited by minor characters who are torn apart, adrift, and forgotten. Between the French avant-garde and the decadence novels of patriarchal families, Limite encounters a dialogue as well as its director.
To understand the relations of Mário Peixoto, the procedure used by Angela de Castro Gomes[22] in Essa gente do Rio: Modernismo e nacionalismo (1979) seems to be productive for this project, which focuses on how the groups were formed, postulating the interdependence between the formation of organizational networks and the types of sensibilities developed thereof. For this purpose, I once more insist on this need for “another Modernism,” for, as Monica Pimenta Velloso[23] argues in História e Modernismo:
The hegemonic narrative of Modernism was a construction employed by the vanguards of São Paulo, who updated it throughout the 1930s and 1950s. Heloisa Pontes shows that the network was broad and diversified, including the School of Philosophy and Letters at the University of São Paulo (USP), the press through newspapers (Folha de São Paulo and Estado de São Paulo) and magazines (Anhembi and Clima), and publishers (Nacional and Martins). (Velloso 2010, 23)[24]
And, by placing the 1922 Modern Art Week as a founding event of Brazilian Modernism, such a fact is observed in the consecration and uses of the term Modernism. She continues:
The terminology is in such a way related to the city of São Paulo that one often forgets to contextualize it and its relation to the whole Brazilian dynamic. When mentioned, the term is not used as an adjective, nor in the plural, as if its semantic meaning was already implicitly embedded. The rich polysemy and ambiguity that covers the term is thus annulled. (Velloso 2010, 23-24)[25]
To expand the meanings of this reassessment, Monica Pimenta Velloso (2010) cites several works from the 1980s, such as those of Eduardo Jardim[26] and Silviano Santiago[27], as well as, it would be important to mention, much research on the processes of modernization and/or reassessment of so-called pre-modernism, such as the papers by Flora Süssekind[28] in Cinematógrafo de Letras (1987), by Francisco Foot Hardman in Trem Fantasma: A Modernidade na Selva (1988)[29] and A vingança da Hileia: Euclides da Cunha, a Amazônia e a Literatura Moderna (2009)[30]; Literatura como Missão: tensões sociais e criação cultural na I República (1983)[31] and Orfeu extático na metrópole: São Paulo, sociedade e cultura nos frementes anos 20 (1992)[32], by Nicolau Sevcenko; and closer to cinema studies, the recent Foundational Films: Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil (2018), by Maite Conde[33], all of which, I believe, directly or indirectly contributed to a displacement of the 1922 Modern Art Week as a milestone or founding myth to just one more fundamental, crystallizing moment of previous modernist impulses that unfolded through very distinct horizons.
In the search for a book that addressed this network of modernist intellectuals from Rio de Janeiro in the late 1920s and 1930s, who were interested in intimacy, closer to Catholicism, losers in the intellectual debate, tossed in the common and homogenizing ditch of the right, real or would-be heirs of a long decadent coffee aristocracy or oligarchy, I came across the aforementioned book Essa gente do Rio: Modernismo e Nacionalismo (1979), by Angela De Castro Gomes, which presents the group gathered around the Festa magazine (of which the most well-known name today, but not the most central at the time, was Cecilia Meirelles) and Lanterna Verde as well as the Felipe Daudt Society, formed in honor of the poet who died in France while he was still very young and with whom Mário Peixoto exchanged letters. However, for all I know, Mario Peixoto, Octavio de Faria, and Lúcio Cardoso did not participate in these groups. In the 1930s, in Rio de Janeiro, there seems to be an intellectual diversity perhaps without a clear hegemony, as when Monica Pimenta Velloso[34] in O Modernismo no Rio de Janeiro: Turunas e Quixotes (1996) dwells on the cartoonists of the Dom Quixote magazine. There are even intersections and coexistences beyond the political and artistic differences of the time.
It is also important to highlight the relations between Catholic intellectuals, strengthened in Rio de Janeiro by the creation of the Dom Vidal Center and by the leadership of Jackson de Figueiredo and Alceu Amoroso Lima, and Modernism, which has been studied in the epistolary research undertaken by Leandro Garcia (2012, 2015)[35], and in the doctoral dissertations Ordenar o espiritual: letras e periodismo católico no Brasil, by Leonardo D´Avila Oliveira (2015)[36], and Sob a sombra de Deus: o catolicismo trágico de Octavio de Faria, by Alessandro Garcia (2018)[37]. Octavio de Faria was one of the four writers chosen by Luis Bueno[38] in Uma História do Romance de 30 (2006), which made the view of the author presented by Luiz Lafetá[39] in 1930: A Crítica e o Modernismo (1974) more complex, but a review of his role as film critic and theorist is still overdue. In addition, Octavio de Faria, the author of the now little-read and forgotten Tragedia Burguesa (1985)[40], played an important role in the education of several young artists, from Vinicius de Moraes to Paulo Cezar Saraceni, in addition to Mário Peixoto.
I have sought to prioritize a history of intellectual and artistic life centered on affective networks and not only production and distribution circuits of goods or notions such as the art world, for which one treats as fundamental the crossing between work and life, between economic, social materiality and the poetics of the extractive experience, especially of gold, diamonds, and coffee. To establish from the materiality of the products (gold, diamonds, coffee), and from the debate on extractivism, one less economic study, which cannot be disregarded, and one more poetics. Narratives by the heirs of oligarchies or of a surviving decadentist sensibility, but this does not mean that they have the hegemonic view of the classes to which they belong nor that they are less critical.
If coffee was the death blow in the devastation of the Atlantic Rainforest in Rio de Janeiro (Dean, 1996)[41] and monoculture implied the destruction of people and other species residing there, as well as the deforming and slavery of different cultures of African origin, what emerged afterwards? The concern here is not to find ways to avoid the end of the world, but to understand the experience of those who lived after the end or an end. It does not concern thinking of another world (Gaia or whatever name that one wants to give it), which appears to us to be the heir of a utopian vision, but thinking that another end of the world is possible within a catastrophic view of history marked by an aristocratic and not oligarchic or reactionary sensibility. I am interested in what happens after the end of the world, with ruins, with the gradual recovery of nature, as a forgetting of the splendor of yesteryear and the search for perhaps other ways not only to die but to live, survivals, whose memory is fragmentary and lacunar, minor beings, of decline, of oblivion until maybe an awakening happens or not.
Once again, beyond the debates on the anthropocene (or whatever term that one wants to use) and environmental collapse, the important thing is to remain with whatever helps us to think of these terms and not be afraid or embarrassed to discard them in the face of concerns already suggested in other contexts, such as in the reading of nature in Macunaíma done by Eneida de Souza that presents its current relevance due to the “discourses linked to nature, to empty territories such as the desert, natural reserves, such as the sea, forests, fields, rivers, or to animal life, [which] are inscribed as alternative spaces to reread modernity and the disenchantments of civilization” (Souza 2011, 145)[42].
This modernism would be associated with, but not determined by, a decline in the extraction of gold and diamonds in Minas Gerais as well as the decline of coffee plantations in the Paraíba Valley, with a material poetics within a rural modernity and not a consideration of the countryside in the space of myth or the archaic nor the search for a regionalist local flavor. It would also be interesting to establish dialogues with what Francisco Foot Hardman called
works inscribed in a romanticism [that is] somewhat nostalgic in relation to the extinct pre-capitalist past, aware of disappearing rural landscapes, which seem to contain, by contrast, a harsher criticism of the dominant temporal order such as in Monteiro Lobato’s Urupês; Cidades mortas (1919) and Vida Ociosa de Godofredo Rangel (1920), whose slow pace as an anticlimax of the speed inherent in mechanized urban society, praising an already half unreal life in the countryside, where despite the passing hours, apparently dead or still, it was still possible to give vent to dialogue and organic solidarity, to the spontaneous flow of the narrative experience, all these signs of “resistance” to the overwhelming time of modernity, nonetheless appear in a melancholy environment surrounded by ruins. (Hardman 2009, 294)[43]
A large part of the bibliography on extractivism seeks to criticize an exploratory capitalism with exclusively economic and political perspectives, in search of civilizational alternatives, which, in the case of Latin America, translates into the search for and permanence of Afro-Amerindian traditions, in their practices of resistance, more recently revisited by decolonial perspectives, in the combination of militancy and aesthetics. Now, for my focus, which is not immediately directed at the present and is not associated with Afro-Amerindian traditions, what matters is the inheritance that is in the decadence of agrarian elites and its poetic transmutation. My starting point, besides Limite (1931), is the visual and literary work of Cornélio Penna, in particular, A menina morta (1954)[44], which explores decadence from the perspective of the elite without exempting itself from a critical view of slavery, reevaluating both the work considered as historically isolated and the author in his social reclusion and discretion. I have not had access until now to a possible archive of Cornélio Penna, and as far as I know there is no biography, diary, or letters of his published. Furthermore, I would like to expand his relations to the visual arts, not only within his own practice, but with the work of Goeldi. Both were revisited by an expressionist inheritance that approaches a popular Gothic tradition, recalling that previous works stage the decadence of coffee farming in the Paraíba Valley, such as the aforementioned Cidades mortas, by Monteiro Lobato[45], the chronicles of Euclides da Cunha, published in Contrastes e confrontos (1907)[46], which can be contrasted with A Fazenda, by Luis Martins (1940)[47] and Todos os Mortos, by Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra (2019).
Next, it would be important to explore an unfolding of this tradition up to Cinema Novo. It would also be interesting to investigate why Glauber Rocha was fascinated by a possible film to be made about A menina morta (1954), by Cornélio Penna, proposing to write a script together with Paulo Cesar Saraceni. But first, it is essential to understand the role of Lúcio Cardoso, another novelist of decadence, who explicitly inspired three of Saraceni’s films: Porto das Caixas (1962), A casa assassinada (1971), and O viajante (1998). This relation would be another point of crystallization of this modernist lineage in Cinema Novo, not being indebted to social realism or to allegorical registers, and which goes beyond the mere denomination of narratives of intimacy. A possible relation between Limite (1931), which he only knew from photos, and Saraceni’s films is pointed out by Jean-Claude Bernardet in Brasil em tempo de cinema[48]. Here, the dialogue with Lúcio Cardoso’s diaries, which were only published in their most complete version in 2012[49], as well as with the memoirs of his sister, Maria Helena Cardoso[50], will be fundamental. The work of Lúcio Cardoso, above all Crônica da casa assassinada, strongly relates to the films of Luiz Carlos Lacerda and some plays directed by Gabriel Villela. Cornélio Penna also had his Fronteira (1935)[51] adapted more recently by Rafael Conde (2008), and the work of Farnese de Andrade is also worth exploring. Between the experiences of decadence in Minas Gerais and that of coffee, the play Pedreira das almas, by Jorge de Andrade, staged for the first time in 1958[52], as well as the precursor work of Pelo sertão (1898)[53], by Afonso Arinos, broaden the understanding of the long period of decadence in Minas Gerais (Arruda 1990)[54], which is masterfully represented in Os sinos da agonia (1999)[55], by Autran Dourado.
There is a counterpoint, which should be mentioned, with the tradition of northeastern regionalism, which would have to do with the presence of sugar cane, from classic readings by Gilberto Freyre, in a possible dialogue with Joanna Francesa (1973), by Carlos Diegues, and São Bernardo (1972), by Leon Hirszman, quite distinct from each other, but which may give us new clues of the interest of Cinema Novo filmmakers in the decadentism of the 1970s. This experience is present, at least, since the masterpiece by José Lins do Rego, Fogo morto (1943)[56], also adapted into a film by Marcos Farias (1976), to Francisco Dantas, as well as in the films Açúcar (2020), by Renata Pinheiro and Sérgio de Oliveira, and Superbarroco (2009), by Renata Oliveira. The spectrality of the mills is haunting in O som ao redor (2012), by Kleber Mendonça. Just as the play Pedreira das Almas by Jorge de Andrade makes the link between the decline of mining in Minas Gerais and the emergence of coffee growing, Som ao Redor (2012), by Kleber Mendonça Filho, makes the connection between the decadent agrarian elite and the owners of urban real estate.
The study of the mining crisis can be expanded to the experience in the Diamantina region, which would involve the reading of the diary Minha vida de menina (1947), by Helena Morley[57], which was studied by Alexandre Eulário, Roberto Schwarz, and others, and revisited cinematically by David Neves in Memória de Helena (1970), and by Helena Solberg in Vida de menina (2005), as well as in the debut by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, O padre e a moça (1966), and Vazante (2017), by Daniela Thomas, a film criticized for reflecting slavery from the exclusive perspective of the elite, a controversy that deserves to be revisited, in contrast with the unanimity around Torto Arado (2019), by Itamar Vieira[58].
It would arrive at a poetics of mining in the twentieth century in Minas Gerais, based on the reading of Carlos Drummond de Andrade done by José Miguel Wisnik, among others, and recovered by young filmmakers such as Ana Vaz and Janaína Wagner, as well as in photos by Júlia Pontés.
Afterwards, it could even investigate what remained of small towns and the notion of provincialism. Films such as Histórias que só existem quando lembradas (2011), by Julia Murat, and Uma Vida em Segredo (2001), by Suzana Amaral, an adaptation of the homonymous novel by Autran Dourado (1964)[59], point to this universe of “dead cities” in a stage in which the splendor of the past is a remote memory. Or would there be a reevaluation of the notion of province versus cosmopolitanism?
From a queer perspective, there is an inclusion of lineage in the intellectual sphere to read beyond the family logic of thinking about heritage and ancestry, a rethinking of friendships and encounters in their fluidity and not in their institutionalization. The question of friendship has a long history and has been updated by such important authors as Foucault and Derrida, but the recent book A violência das letras: amizade e inimizade na literatura brasileira (1888-1940) (2018) has proved to be a valuable study for an understanding of such relations in Modernism. It interests us, in particular, for an understanding of the affective network of Mário Peixoto and whether friendship would account for these relations. The argument of Cesar Braga Pinto (2018)[60] is that, since 1888, the theme of friendship, of friendships, sociability, and concord – with its corollaries, that is, enmities, rivalries, hostilities, and discord – had become relatively recurrent in national literature, often associated with issues of democratization, on the one hand, and social, ethnic, and racial differences or inequalities on the other (2018, p. 10). He adds that “what matters here is not only to identify the dynamics of friendships and rivalries, but above all, to track the way in which they were thematized, studied, contested, debated, or fictionalized by the man of letters of the period”[61], and takes as a hypothesis that
in Brazilian fiction, the theme of friendship between two men, which had been central until the turn of the century, tends to lose ground from the 1920s onwards and above all in the 1930s, when the great characters of Graciliano Ramos or José Lins do Rego, among the most canonical, are men who are solitary, suspicious and deprived of – or even uninterested in – true friends” (Pinto 2018)[62].
There are many ideas that will be explored throughout the book, but with regard to these relations that I am trying to map, questions of social or racial inequalities are not made explicit due to the relative homogeneity of a white upper class. As for political positions, they oscillate between an apolitical, conservative or even reactionary view. Racial and class inequalities emerge in relations outside the intellectual milieu. In the shattered world in which they live and act, between the ruins of the patriarchal family and solitude, perhaps fewer dyads emerge, although we can think of how to understand the great friendship between Mário Peixoto and Octavio de Faria or between Mário Peixoto and Brutus Pedreira. But, above all, they appear in the formulation of dispersed, bohemian networks, which are consolidated with avant-garde groups, but which do not preclude political, intellectual, and social fluidity among groups. From Mário Peixoto onwards, we see not a virile community, resulting from the fraternity of men of letters (Pinto 2018, 327), but an association of another order that is not so much associated with a professional network but is closer to gay fraternities that became notable from the 1960s onwards as spaces of sociability for those who distanced themselves from their families, an order that is furthermore not necessarily linked to support in the intellectual milieu or to explicitly militant or political connotations.
In any case, it is important to emphasize that I have begun to think of Mário Peixoto not as an individual, an author, but as a bundle of relations within a queer aesthetic and artistic history, not an activist one focused on pride, but one centered on shyness, on melancholy, on failure, which are disregarded because they are hardly political and associated with a low self-esteem. But to what extent has pride been inserted into the narcissistic production machine of feeling good, positive thinking, and happiness, as well as into spaces of legitimation and success? It is necessary to think less about a positive inversion or resemantization, and more about the singularities of the unsaid and of how it is said, less through confession, through the supposed authenticity of testimony, and more through the fictionalization of the self or, in the words of Anna Klobucka (2008)[63] about António Botto, through a “fictionalizing self-invention” that complexifies what could be considered as mythomania, megalomania, or mere narcissism, in which imagination and fantasy are not dissociated from what is called reality.
It does not concern putting words into the mouths of authors or fearing to look for other words to hear and translate what they say to us today, melancholy as the survival of the living past in the face of oblivion and the centering on a here and now without temporality, failure as another way of living centered on uselessness, unproductiveness, impotence instead of career, work, inclusion in national thinking, and creating that involves the construction of a public image, on the composition of circles and groups, or even their refusal beyond resentment, victimization, or social ascension based on difference, social climbing through the world of easy sub-celebrities, of influencers who pass for public intellectuals. I was thinking more, based on Mário Peixoto’s example, of affects as marks of a differentiation before (and maybe after) a politics of coming out, of the politicization of visibility in favor of more subtle indications that reassess silence not as death, of subtlety instead of confrontation.
Not so much a gay authorship or way of life (Klobucka 2018) but something closer to the environment of the Contemporéneos in the México of Salvador Novo, of Xavier Villaurutia, of male homosociabilities and homoaffectivities in bars, cinemas, theaters, at each other’s homes, at parties in Petrópolis, outside urban centers, on farms, in hotels, in nature, and even in spaces belonging to other social classes. To think about whether it is possible to be among men, as a way of living (if it is possible or if you choose to do so), being together in time, seen not under the nostalgia of monosexual, misogynistic, elitist, white spaces, which they also were, in part, but from the perspective of those who suffer social disqualification, the loss of political and economic power, decadence, the very way of living after the end, and not so much in the experience of power or in the desire for power, of canonical centrality even when one wants or attains some recognition.
Perhaps the link to Mário Peixoto’s Modernism should be made by the film criticism of Octavio de Faria, which I will not do here, nor will I discuss the extent to which Octavio can be included in a modern, if not modernist field. In turn, the intellectual scene of Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s and 1930s was recently revisited by Metrópole à beira-mar: o Rio Moderno dos anos 20, by Ruy Castro[64], which, added to a previous bibliography, I believe does not only concern modernist elements, but also modernist and modern perspectives in Rio de Janeiro as in other cities.
It is important not only to map the geographic spaces through which Mário Peixoto traveled, the displacements between them, but also to think of them as affective spaces (Gomes 1999, 20), to consider his presence, between the late 1920s to at least 1935, at cinemas, cafes, and parties in Rio de Janeiro and Petrópolis, due to his social origins, being, on his mother’s side, the great-grandson of Joaquim José de Sousa Breve, the largest coffee producer (who was even called The King of Coffee), and a large slave trader in the Second Empire, owner of 20 farms in the south of Rio de Janeiro (Pessoa 2018)[65] who was in crisis as of 1870, like all the coffee plantations in the Paraíba Valley, a fortune that was largely lost before Peixoto’s birth; and having, on the paternal side, a fortune derived mainly from sugar plantations in the north of the state and property in the city of Rio de Janeiro, which he completely spent over the course of his eighty years. But his presence is also associated with intellectual bohemianism, at the Schnoor family salon, where he possibly met Raul Schnoor, the protagonist of Limite (1931); at the Teatro de Brinquedo, a pioneering work of modern theater, studied by Walder de Souza and Gustavo Assano (2012)[66], in which Peixoto participated in a play as an actor, his primary desire, and to which he was possibly lead by the hand from his mentor and lifelong friend, Brutus Pedreira, a pianist, teacher, director, and theater producer, one of the founders of the Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia (TBC), who played the pianist in Limite. Naturally, it is important to mention the link with the Chaplin Club (1928-1931), of which he was not an active member, however, due to Octavio de Faria, who was also a lifelong friend and, despite having the same age, Peixoto’s intellectual mentor, which must have marked his education, and where Limite was released in 1931, whose debut was calculatedly edited by Peixoto and Faria and which has several versions, including that of Mário Peixoto when he tried to transform the first exhibition into something similar to the presentation of the Rite of Spring in 1913 (Lopes 2020)[67], a milestone of avant-garde presentations.
During initial research in the periodicals library at the National Library, the presence of Mário Peixoto in the press at the time is notable, not only on account of Limite, but furthermore due to the making of what would come to be his second film, Onde a terra acaba (1933), which was completed without his direction and was quite different from the original project. Finally, although he did not occupy a central place at the Teatro de Brinquedo or the Chaplin Club, Peixoto’s isolation, at least between the late 1920s and 1936, must be problematized.
Our third and last hypothesis is that a key to reading this “other Mario” would be to include him in a lineage of “another Modernism,” an expression taken from A crise da pessoalidade e o outro modernismo; Cornelio Penna, Oswaldo Goeldi e Mario Peixoto, by Paulo Venâncio (1992)[68], which matters more due to the gesture of bringing together these artists from different languages than due to the way it suggests this other Modernism marked by a philosophical debate that he calls a crisis of personality. Here, from a more historical perspective, in search of lineages and heritages, this other Modernism, in short, is marked by cosmopolitanism, both in the desire for inclusion in the world (Santiago 2013)[69] and by Christian universalism, instead of the formation of a national culture; by catastrophe instead of utopia; by melancholy instead of joy; by the sensation of the end of the world or a world instead of the inauguration of a new era; by the fascination for the slowness that comes from the slowness of devastated landscapes, of “dead cities,” and of the small cities in detriment to the speed and hypersensoriality of the big modern cities. We could think of a rural modernity, even a rural Modernism, and not just a modernization of the countryside (Beckman 2016)[70] performed by the economic relations established between capitalism and the countryside, rethinking the notion of province. This legacy is interested in failure and uselessness as ways of being in the world and differs both from a lineage that goes from Anthropophagy to Tropicalism and from the persistence of Naturalism in the Regionalism of the 1930s and beyond.
In the actual case of Limite[71], the tension between the sea and the ruins of the dead city are crucial in order to identify this critical view of Modernity, assuming here obviously not a parodic but a melancholic tone that only redeems through death or beauty, or more precisely, through death in beauty, through the shipwreck that is the disappearance of human experience which is synthesized in the image of the golden sea at the beginning and end of the film. This would be the answer that Limite gives to what endures after the simultaneous shipwreck, failure, and disappearance, that there is no possible escape from deserted and dead cities, from devastated landscapes, from ruins, from the reconquest of nature, and finally, from the sea. Sensations remain that survive us for a few moments. A world without modernity? without humanism? without the human being? Neither the crisis of the anthropocene nor the dawn of Gaia, the end has already happened. Another end of the world is possible.
Denilson Lopes
Translated from the Portuguese by Marco Alexandre de Oliveira
[1] Mário Peixoto, Cadernos Verdes (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Mario Peixoto, 1933). Manuscript | Mário Peixoto, Diário da Inglaterra. (Arquivo Mário Peixoto, s.d. Manuscrito, 1928).
[2] André Botelho; Maurício Hoelz. Modernismo como movimento cultural: Mário de Andrade, um aprendizado. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2022.
[3] Mário Peixoto, Mundéu (Rio de Janeiro: Sette Letras, 1996).
[4] Mário Peixoto, O Inútil De Cada Um (Rio de Janeiro; Sette Letras,1996 [1931]).
[5] Mário Peixoto, Poemas de permeio com o Mar (Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2002).
[6] Mário Peixoto, Escritos sobre Cinema (Rio de Janeiro, Aeroplano, 2000).
[7] Julio Bressane, Alguns (Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1996).
[8] Saulo Mello Pereira Limite (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1996).
[9] Emil de Castro, Jogos de armar: a vida do solitário Mário Peixoto, o cineasta de Limite (Rio de Janeiro: Lacerda, 2000).
[10] Michael Korfmann, Ten contemporary views on Mário Peixoto’s Limite (Münster: Mv wissenshaft, 2006).
[11] Denilson Lopes, Mário Peixoto antes e depois de Limite (São Paulo: E- Galaxia, 2021).
[12] Sheila Schvarzman, Humberto Mauro e as Imagens do Brasil (São Paulo: Ed. Unesp, 2004). |
Eduardo Morettin, Humberto Mauro, Cinema, História (São Paulo: Alameda, 2013).
[13] Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes, Humberto Mauro, Cataguases, Cinearte (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1974), 173.
[14] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “Os modernistas de Cataguases como os de todo o Brasil, talvez com as únicas exceções de Mario de Andrade e Menotti Del Pichia ignoraram o cinema nacional, ao mesmo tempo que o cinema brasileiro daquele tempo, excetuando Mario Peixoto – também poeta moderno – não sabiam sequer que o Modernismo existia”.
[15] Ismail Xavier, Sétima arte: um culto moderno, o idealismo estético e o cinema (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1978).
[16] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “de qualquer modo, o filme produzido em 1930 tem uma relação muito mediatizada com o modernismo dos anos 20, não sendo possível vê-lo algo diretamente vinculado às preocupações cinematográficas dos participantes do movimento.”
[17] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “pela data de produção e pelo isolamento, confirma a defasagem entre o cinema e outros setores de nossa cultura.”
[18] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “Esperemos que a aura dele não produza agora a mesma reverencia silenciosa que o mito de Chaplin produziu sobre os teóricos do Fan [publicação do Chaplin Club]. E que o culto de sua grandeza não faça dele um filme “indiscutível”, de quase impossível acesso”.
[19] For this relation between cinema and modernist literature, not to mention the studies on adaptations, I would like highlight the article “A décima musa – Mário de Andrade e o cinema,” by Eduardo Escorel from 1992 and published in his book Adivinhadores de Água (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2004), which performs a mapping of Mário de Andrade’s interest in cinema and the importance of Mário de Andrade for cinema, as well as more wide-reaching works such as Modernidade toda prosa (2014), by Eneida Maria de Souza and Marillia Rothier Cardoso, and A Invenção do Cinema Brasileiro: Modernismo em três Tempos (2015), by Paulo Paranaguá, also from the same collection Modernismo+90, published by Casa do Saber.
[20] Sérgio Miceli, Intelectuais e classe dirigente no Brasil (1920-1940) (São Paulo: Difel, 1979).
[21] Lúcio Cardoso, Crônica da casa assassinada (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2004 [1959]).
[22] Angela de Castro, Essa gente do Rio: modernismo e nacionalismo (Rio de Janeiro: FGV, 1999), 11.
[23] Monica Pimenta Velloso, História e modernismo (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2010).
[24] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “A narrativa hegemônica do Modernismo foi uma construção empreendida pelas vanguardas paulistas, que a atualizaram ao longo das décadas de 1930 e 1950. Heloisa Pontes mostra que a rede foi ampla e diversificada, incluindo a Faculdade de Filosofia e Letras da USP, a imprensa através dos jornais (Folha de São Paulo e Estado de São Paulo) e revistas (Anhembi e Clima) e editoras (Nacional e Martins).”
[25] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “A terminologia está de tal forma relacionada à cidade de São
Paulo que frequentemente deixa-se de contextualizá-la na articulação com o conjunto da dinâmica brasileira. Quando mencionado, o termo não é adjetivado, nem pluralizado como se a sua carga semântica já estivesse implicitamente embutida. Anula-se dessa forma, a rica polissemia e a ambiguidade da qual se reveste o termo”.
[26] Eduardo Jardim, A Brasilidade Modernista e sua dimensão filosófica (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. PUC-Rio, 2014).
[27] Silviano Santiago. Nas malhas da letra. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1988).
[28] Flora Süssekind. Cinematógrafo de Letras (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987).
[29] Francisco Foot Hardman, Trem Fantasma: A modernidade na selva (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1988).
[30] Francisco Foot Hardman. A vingança da Hiléia: Euclides da Cunha, a Amazônia e a literatura moderna (São Paulo: Ed. da Unesp, 2009).
[31] Francisco Foot Hardman. A vingança da Hiléia: Euclides da Cunha, a Amazônia e a literatura moderna (São Paulo: Ed. da Unesp, 2009).
[32] Nicolau Sevcenko, Literatura como Missão: tensões sociais e criação cultural na I República (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1983).
[33] Maite Conde, Foundational films: early cinema and modernity in Brazil (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018).
[34] Monica Pimenta Velloso, Modernismo no Rio de Janeiro: turunas e quixotes (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 1996).
[35] Leandro Garcia, Alceu Amoroso Lima: Cultura, Religião e Vida Literária (São Paulo: Edusp, 2012) and Leandro Garcia (Ed), Correspondência de Mário de Andrade e Alceu Amoroso Lima (São Paulo: Edusp, 2018).
[36] Leonardo D´Ávila Oliveira, “Ordenar o Espiritual: Letras e Periodismo Católico no Brasil (1928-1945)” (PhD diss., University Federal of Santa Catarina, 2015).
[37] Alessandro Garcia. Sob a sombra de Deus: o catolicismo trágico de Octavio de Faria (Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ, 2018).
[38] Luís Bueno, Uma história do romance de 30 (Campinas: Ed. Unicamp, 2006).
[39] João Luiz Lafetá, 1930: A Crítica e o Modernismo (São Paulo, Editora 34/Duas Cidades, 2000).
[40] Octavio de Faria, Tragédia Burguesa (Obra Completa) (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas – Instituto Nacional do Livro/Fundação Nacional Pró-Memória, 1985).
[41] Warren Dean, A ferro e fogo: a história e a devastação da Mata Atlântica brasileira (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996).
[42] Eneida Maria de Souza, Janelas indiscretas: ensaios de crítica biográfica (Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2011).
[43] The original quote in Portuguese reads: ““obras inscritas num romantismo algo nostálgico em relação ao passado pré-capitalista extinto, ciosas de paisagens rurais em desaparição, que parecem conter, por contraste, critica mais aguda a ordem temporal dominante como em Monteiro Lobato em Urupês; Cidades mortas, 1919 e Vida Ociosa de Godofredo Rangel, 1920, cujo ritmo lento como anticlímax da velocidade inerente à sociedade urbana mecanizada, tecendo-se o elogio de uma vida já meio irreal no campo, onde não obstante a passagem de horas aparentemente mortas e paradas, era ainda possível dar vazão ao diálogo e a solidariedade orgânica, ao fluxo espontâneo da experiencia narrativa. todos esses sinais de “resistência” ao tempo avassalador da modernidade, entretanto comparecem num ambiente melancólico rodeado de ruínas”.
[44] Cornélio Penna, A menina morta (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1970 [1954]).
[45] Monteiro Lobato, Cidades mortas (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Azul, 2008 [1919]).
[46] Euclides da Cunha, Contrastes e confrontos (Via Leitura, 2016, [1907])
[47] Luis Martins, A Fazenda (São Paulo: Ed. Guaira, 1940).
[48] Jean-Claude Bernardet, Brasil em tempo de cinema (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2007), 118.
[49] Lúcio Cardoso, Diários (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2012).
[50] Maria Helena Cardoso, Por onde andou meu coração (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2007 [1967]).
[51] Cornélio Penna, Fronteira (Rio de Janeiro: Faria e Silva, 2021 [1935]).
[52] Jorge de Andrade, Pedreira das Almas. Rio de Janeiro: Agir, 1986 [1958]).
[53] Afonso Arinos, Pelo sertão. (Rio de Janeiro: Laemmert, 1898).
[54] Maria Arminda Arruda, Mitologia da mineiridade: o imaginário mineiro na vida política e cultural do Brasil (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1990).
[55] Autran Dourado, Os sinos da agonia. (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1999 [1988])
[56] José Lins Rego, Fogo morto (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1943).
[57] Helena Morley, Minha vida de menina. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2016 [1947]),
[58] Itamar Vieira, Torto Arado (São Paulo: Todavia, 2019).
[59] Autran Dourado, Uma vida em segredo (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2000 [1964])
[60] Cesar Braga Pinto, A violência das letras: amizade e inimizade na literatura brasileira (1888-1940) (Rio de Janeiro: EDUERJ, 2018).
[61] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “na ficção brasileira, o tema da amizade entre dois homens, central até a virada do século, tende a perder o espaço da partir da década de 1920 e sobretudo nos anos 1930, quando os grandes personagens de Graciliano Ramos ou de José Lins do Rego, entre os mais canônicos, são homens solitários, desconfiados e desprovidos de – ou até mesmo desinteressados em – verdadeiros amigos.”
[62] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “na ficção brasileira, o tema da amizade entre dois homens, central até a virada do século, tende a perder o espaço da partir da década de 1920 e sobretudo nos anos 1930, quando os grandes personagens de Graciliano Ramos ou de José Lins do Rego, entre os mais canônicos, são homens solitários, desconfiados e desprovidos de – ou até mesmo desinteressados em – verdadeiros amigos.”
[63] Anna M Klobucka, O Mundo Gay de António Botto (Lisboa: Documenta, 1918), 39.
[64] Ruy Castro, Metrópole à beira-mar. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019).
[65] Tiago Pessoa, O Império Da Escravidão: o Complexo Breves no vale do café entre 1855 e 1888 (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 2018).
[66] Gustavo Assano. “‘Teatro Moderno’ e o Teatro de Brinquedo de Álvaro Moreyra”. Revista de Estudos Literários, 24, (dez de 2012): 81-91.
[67] About the release of the film: Denilson Lopes. “Mário Peixoto, Octavio de Faria e a invenção de Limite (1931)”, Rebeca, 9, 2, (julho a dezembro de 2021): 352-383.
[68] Paulo Venâncio. A crise da pessoalidade e o outro modernismo: Cornelio Penna, Oswaldo Goeldi e Mario Peixoto. (MA thesis, University Fedetal of Rio de Janeiro, 1992).
[69] Silviano Santiago, “Mecânica dos trens e da literatura; Raízes do cosmopolitismo no Brasil: Formação e inserção”, In Aos sábados, pela manhã: Sobre autores e livros, ed. Fred Coelho (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2013).
[70] Ericka Beckman, “Unfinished transitions: the dialectics of rural modernization in Latin American fiction”, Modernism/modernity, 23, 4, (novembro de 2016): 813-832.
[71] For a closer reading of the film: Denilson Lopes. Um Outro Modernismo: Limite de Mario Peixoto In Releituras do Modernismo: O Legado de 1922 na Cultura Brasileira, ed. Ivan Marques (São Paulo: BBM, 2022, 164/174).