The lie that told the truth: (Self) publicity strategies and the myth of Mario Peixoto's Limite

October of 1931 witnessed the inauguration of the statue of Christ the Redeemer atop Corcorvado mountain overlooking Rio de Janeiro. The breathtaking cityscape of the 'marvelous city' would now become much like the one we know today; our picture postcard view of Rio was now complete. Less than five months earlier, Rio had provided the venue for the first screening of Mário Peixoto's Limite, a film which has become as synonymous with Brazilian cinema as the statue has with the city itself. The difference between the two events is significant; while hundreds of thousands have visited Christ the Redeemer and millions more recognize it as a Brazilian landmark, Peixoto's film was virtually inaccessible for some forty-six years, and during this time, was only viewed by a small inner circle of critics, artists, and students. We are hard-pressed to think of a film in any national cinema which has been at once as absent and present as Limite. Despite its initial 1931 screening, this avant-garde feature was never released until 1978, enjoying only occasional private screenings. Nonetheless, a good number of film directors and critics deemed it the greatest Brazilian film of all time, even during its years of obscurity. Moreover, the film's cult status in Brazil (and internationally!) was founded upon a tightly woven net of deception and intrigue which, when unraveled and exposed, has failed to render the film any less of a milestone. One might dub Limite 'the lie that redeemed itself', or to appropriate Phillip Core's remarks regarding the phenomenon of camp, 'the lie that tells the truth'.¹ When Bakhtin speaks of a heteroglossia of discourses, his remarks apply to Limite in a unique manner, for in this film, we encounter the convergence of myth and reality, of fabrication and earned acclaim.² Despite the director's own personal self-deception regarding the film's true status, it was in part the mystique Limite had attained which spurred a campaign spanning almost two decades to save the masterpiece from irreversible deterioration and to restore it as closely as possible to its original state. Today, thanks to the efforts of the Mário Peixoto Archives in Rio de Janeiro and its curator, Saulo Pereira de Mello, himself one of the two main champions of the restoration of the film, a wealth of documentation exists which permits the construction of an 'archeology' of Limite and of its true place as a national cultural icon. Mello, who has edited many of Mário Peixoto's own writings, has produced a cornerstone around which further scholarship on Limite can now be undertaken and a solid critical corpus built.

Given the film's absence for many key years in the development of Brazilian cinema, one of the most significant factors contributing to the development of what I will term its 'pre-status' as cultural icon was an extensive publicity strategy which extended from well prior to the film's first screening through its restoration. Integral to this strategy was the self-promotion undertaken by Mário Peixoto and the director's own creation of an extensive apocryphal history of the film's reception, which clouds even recent critical discourse. Pivotal players in this strategy have numbered leaders in the arts, including director Glauber Rocha, poet/songwriter Vinícius de Moraes, and actress Carmen Santos, whose own career was built upon a complex publicity campaign which bestowed on her celebrity status long before her sporadic film career became a reality. The publicity strategy of Limite, moreover, embraced individuals who never actually saw the film, among these, Eisenstein and Pudovkin, to whom favorable reviews were attrib-uted.³ Again, had it not been for the film's deceptive paratextual baggage, a cornerstone of Brazilian cinema would have been forover lost.