By LARRY ROHTER

Over the years, the Brazilian experimental silent film “Limite,” made in 1930 by the director Mario Peixoto, has become something of a legend among film enthusiasts, a movie more talked about than seen.

But a newly restored two-hour version now exists, and its showing is one of the highlights of the World Cinema Foundation festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this month. “ ‘Limite’ is a great work in world cinema in the sense that it is a completely independent film that has a unique place in Brazilian and film history,” said Kent Jones, executive director of the foundation.

The retrospective will show a dozen films that the foundation has helped restore since the director Martin Scorsese founded the nonprofit organization in 2007.


A legendary
director who made
only one film.


Besides “Limite,” the festival will feature films from Egypt, Turkey, India, Senegal, South Korea, Hungary, Morocco, Taiwan, Mexico and Kazakhstan. It is the visually poetic, somewhat abstract “Limite” that has probably the longest and most complicated and improbable history.

Peixoto was barely 20 and recently returned from Europe when he shot the film, essentially as a home movie, indulging his taste for the avant-garde and encountering rejection when he sought a commercial release.

“The exhibitors were afraid that what happened with Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ would happen with this,” said Saulo Pereira de Mello, director of the Mario Peixoto Archive in Rio de Janeiro, referring to the riot that occurred in Paris in 1913 when the ballet of that name, with music by the Russian composer, had its premiere. “This was a film meant to be very much in the vanguard.

The cultural right wing that dominated at that time simply detested it, while distributors considered it too difficult for audiences.” Peixoto, a member of what was then one of the most affluent families in Brazil, never made another film (he died in 1992), preferring instead to dabble in literature and theater.

But “Limite” eventually became a cult favorite. By the end of the 1950s, though, prints of “Limite” had vanished or were so degraded that the film was in danger of being lost. Restoration based on what was thought to be the last remaining copy began in 1959 and has continued , most recently under the aegis of the Cinemateca Brasileira, which in 1988 designated “Limite” as the greatest Brazilian film ever made.

A new generation of critics and filmmakers made pilgrimages to talk to Peixoto, among them the Brazilian Walter Salles, whose credits include “Central Station” and “The Motorcycle Diaries.” He has described “Limite’’ as “a film of transcendent poetry and boundless imagination.” He established the Mario Peixoto Archive in 1994 to safeguard documents related to Peixoto, whom he had helped support financially .

“ ‘Limite’ is a film with a history that is wrapped in mythology, with an aura of mystery about it,” Mr. Pereira de Mello said. “Now, having it cleaned and restored like this, it’s almost like it’s a new film, and you can truly appreciate its greatness. ”