Mário Peixoto

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Mário Rodrigues Breves Peixoto (1908 — 1992) was mainly known for his first and only film Limite, a silent experimental movie filmed in 1930 and first exhibited in 1931. Peixoto wrote, directed and took up a minor role in the film. Its musical score include Eric Satie, Claude Debussy, Alexander Borodin, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev and César Franck. Limite has over the years become a quite legendary cult movie. In 1988, the Cinemateca Brasileira named it best Brazilian film of all time. In 1995 Limite is once again considered the best Brazilian film of all time in a national inquiry held by the newspaper Folha de São Paulo and in 1996, director and producer Walter Salles founds the Mário Peixoto Archive located in his firm VideoFilmes in Rio where Saulo Pereira de Mello takes care of the original manuscripts and objects from the film. He also edits publications by and on Peixoto. Onde a terra acaba ("At the edge of the earth"), the title of one among Mário’s unfinished projects, is also the name of a documentary film on Mário from 2001, directed by Salles former assistant, Sérgio Machado.

Around the same period in which Limite is being planed and filmed, Mário Peixoto also began to write and publish. In 1931, he released a collection of poems called Mundéu (reedited in 1996) which is characterized by a strong modernist accent and has a foreword by Mário de Andrade. In the same year Peixoto published, in a magazine called Bazar, three short stories and a play, that are part of a collection published by Saulo Pereira de Mello in 2004: Seis contos e duas peças curtas which also includes undated and so far unpublished material written by Mário. In 2002, another collection of poems written between 1930 and 1960, Poemas de permeio com o mar was published. In 1933 Mário published, as a private edition, his first romance, O inútil de cada um (re-edited in 1996). From 1968 on Mário re-elaborated the original text of 1933, using it as matrix for an extended version divided in six volumes. So fare only the first volume O inútil de cada um – Itamar has been released in 1984, through intervention of Jorge Amado, with whom Mário had worked on one of his film projects.

There are few publications in English on Mario Peixoto or Limite, described by French film historian Georges Sadoul as an "unknown masterpiece". In 2006, Michael Korfmann edited a volume that offers ten contemporary views regarding the genesis, aesthetic and reception of the film, gathering contributions by filmmakers and writers from Brazil, Great Britain and the United States including Walter Salles, Saulo Pereira de Mello, Carlos Augusto Calil, William M. Drew, Alexander Graf, Paulo Venancio Filho, Constança Hertz, Aparecida do Carmo Frigeri Berchior, Marco Lucchesi and Marcelo Noah as well as a rare article written by Mário Peixoto himself.