Rise, vertigo and fall in Mário Peixoto’s Limite and Mundéu

Abstract

In this article we seek to trace the “plastic-verbal” correspondences between the poetic and cinematographic oeuvres of Mário Peixoto (1908-1992), seeking the points of contact between these two artistic languages. By a comparison between the decoupage of three scenes from the film Limite and the scansion of the poem “A grande curva”, published in the book Mundéu, we believe it is possible to glimpse how Mário Peixoto’s poetry and mise-en-scène obey the same formal construction logic. To this purpose, we will use studies by Mário de Andrade, Paulo Henriques Britto, Flora Süssekind and some operative concepts of Sergei Eisenstein’s montage theory. We will demonstrate how Peixoto absorbed the debates of his time, transfiguring his poetry into cinema and, conversely, how cinema “shaped” his poems. The proposal is to think of Peixoto’s work beyond a strictly cinematographic theory, focusing on the fruitful exchange between cinema, literary theory and the studies of poetry.