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Deslimite {Otac​í​lio Melga​ç​o} [duration 02​:​00​:​00]

by Otacílio Melgaço

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about

D e s l i m i t e

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 02:00:00] all rights reserved

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The artist Otacílio Melgaço has two official curators in the virtual world. A curator (from Latin: ´curare´, meaning ´to take care´) is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library or, as the present case: sound archive) is a content specialist charged with an institution's collections and, highlighting the context in force here, involved with the interpretation of personal (heritage) material. Both, Mr. Paz and Mr. Campbell, are, therefore, reviewers of the Melgacian works. To learn more about their missions, tasks, assignments and responsibilities by means of valuable informations regarding the compositional process, the performative rhizomes and other special features, just click the following link: otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/preamblebypsp
(O.M.Team; P r e l u d e)

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"´Limite´. Its musical score include Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Alexander Borodin, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, César Franck but if there´s a name that Otacílio Melgaço perhaps pays homage is Erik Satie.

Recently O.M. visited cinematic niches through inventive spectra of Ingmar Bergman

melgacootacilio.bandcamp.com/album/hemmet-av-isak-jacobi-otac-lio-melga-o-duration-01-08-45

and now takes a step forward.

Create posthumously and independently an original soundtrack for a silent film.

Michael Korfmann (professor of Comparative Studies at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul at Porto Alegre, Brazil) offers us very valuable information: ´Peixoto’s original plan to underline his film with natural noise as wind, rustling leaves or breaking waves was abandoned due to technical difficulties and substituted by a record-soundtrack chosen by Brutus Pedreira, who played the pianist in Limite and had actually been a musician in real life. The chosen musical themes - among others, from Satie, Debussy, Borodin, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Cesar Franck - were then played on two alternating record players during the screening, frequently operated by Peixoto and Pedreira themselves. Due to this procedure, in later exhibitions, the film had been frequently shown without any musical accompany and only with the editing of the video, images and music have been definitely integrated. Knowing Peixoto’s obsession with details concerning his film, arranging even the plants to bow in a certain angle, one may look at the relation between sound and picture of ´Limite´ as a elaborated, frequently contrapuntal conception, an intentional rhythmic discrepancy where sound and image often diverge, opening a third temporal and resonant dimension between the actual scene and a potential, wider space beyond the limitations imposed by the ´framed´ vision and the sequentially of film itself.´

Therefore, ultimately, orchestral consecrated interventions were the applicable denouement. And I agree with Melgaço: I believe that not to use syntax similar to those raised by Mário Peixoto, is a quite sensible solution. Otacílio has opted for - even more than the orchestra - the piano: classical (canonical, consuetudinary, accredited, okeydokey) instrument to be heard concurrently mute projections. Exception is the sixth part, in which there are also strings. Of all these adventures I've ever heard in my life, analyzing each film and each sound insertion, ´Deslimite´ is one of the most complex (and triumphant). In what sense?

The zealous psychological understanding of the visual source;

deep atmospheric interpenetration but in own rhythmicity;

perceptive, intuitive, poetic metaphysical synchronicities while, paradoxically, there´s compliance with intrinsic counterpoints, resonances and other flowing original particularities;

heterodox structural that value creative independence (optic and audible circuits);

punctual range of related sensations in synaesthesia;

´divergences´ as an aesthetic enrichment factor;

the rescue of concrete sounds - desired by Mário - like the sea waves;

spread of discrepancies as a way to stress - de facto - a third dimension between both artistic languages etc.

There´s a weighting of giant Stanley Kubrick that fit like a glove on what I'm arguing: ´A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.´ Here´s an almost perfect definition for reverberant 'Deslimite'.

The indelible admiration that Otacílio Melgaço always nurtured for Mário Peixoto certainly contributed to the success of the whole process. It´s a tribute, I have no doubt. ´According to the director, ´Limite´ is meticulously precise as invisible wheels of a clock, where long shots are surrounded and linked by shorter ones as in a planetary system. Peixoto characterizes his film as a ‘desperate scream’ aiming for resonance instead of comprehension. It shows without words and without analysis. It projects itself as a tuning fork, a pitch, a resonance of time itself, capturing the flow between past and present, object details and contingence as if it had always existed in the living and in the inanimate, or detaching itself tacitly from them. Since ´Limite´ is more of a state than an analysis, characters and narrative lines emerge, followed by a probing camera exploring angles, details, possibilities of access and fixation, only then to fade out back into the unknown, a visual stream with certain densifications or illustrations within the continues flow of time. According to Peixoto, all these poetic transpositions find despair and impossibilities; a luminous pain which unfolds in rhythm and coordinates the images of rare precision and structure.´ To me these seem to be guidelines faithfully followed by the composer Melgaço and inspiringly by multi-instrumentalist.

Spanless measureless limitless ... paths.

Melgaço to Pay in the Sea...

The Third Bank of the Sea...

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P o s t S c r i p t u m

C U R I O

i - ´Limite´ may be seen as on the historical l-i-m-i-t between silent movies and talkies... This potential watershed may have further influenced the choice of Otacílio;

ii - ´Limite´ lasts 120 minutes. It is exactly the time that we take to hear the highlighted phonograph album;

iii - ´David Bowie chooses ´Limite´ as the only Brazilian film among his ten favorites from Latin America for the High Line Festival in 2007´;

iv - ´The film has been restored by the Cinemateca Brasileira and the new version was presented in November 2011 at the Auditorium Ibirapuera in Sao Paulo with a new soundtrack, composed by the Norwegian musician Bugge Wesseltoft. The musician came to Brazil to perform a live session accompanying the screening with fellow Norwegian Hello Kvernberg (violin), Rodolfo Stroeter (bass), Naná Vasconcelos (percussion) and Miranda Marlui (flute and vocal).´ I heard fragments and can reiterate the unquestionable quality of the musicians and compositions. However, are very different perspectives. Wesseltoft seem well behaved. It´s a soundtrack 'politically correct', in other words. Pleasant and predictable. A good example of listening comprehension. Otacílio prefers taking risks and focusing on an instrument and its absolute thoroughness; distanced himself from the nice surfaces of conventional creations. Reaches the medulla. If ´Peixoto characterizes his film as a ‘desperate scream’ aiming for resonance instead of comprehension´, the Melgacian saga is the most suitable although tortuous. There we hear the resonant echo of this cry - the despair of a primal scream, I guarantee;

v - Yet speaking of tribute and curtsey... ´Limite´. Its musical score include Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Alexander Borodin, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, César Franck but if there´s a name that Otacílio Melgaço perhaps pays homage is Erik Satie.
The s-u-r-r-e-a-l-i-s-t perspective that I embrace: what we heard could be compared with Erik composing and playing in the current 2015 - with all the technological apparatus available (as is used by O.M.) - however after many, many Absinthe doses. A high stage next to unambiguous green Fairy... If there´s some purposeful vert humor in my elucubration, you make no mistake: the hypothesis is fabulous for me! (This is one of the most prominent emblems that, in my concept, an actual Piano Work could receive!, ladies and gentlemen...). Because I am referring to an extrapolate art; the undeniable ability to surprise us tremendously, leaving us astonished. In proposing true sonic odysseys that do not allow ourselves to be lobotomized or desensitized or trivialized by the ephemerality of ordinary life. Not the ordinary, is the emeraldine EXTRAordinary that we witnessed here. Boundless..." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"´Limite´, a silent experimental film.

Otacílio agrees with those who think ´Limite´ the best Brazilian cinematographic work of all time.

Silent and experimental.

And now - eighty-five years later, won a peculiar and unparalleled Melgacian soundtrack also soundless and exploratory.

But if ´Limite´ means ´Limit´ or ´Border´; ´Deslimite´ is the opposite. The prefix ´de´ - in Portuguese - is tantamount to 'un' - in English.
No limit, unlimited. No border, unbordered.

In my opinion this is what O.M. achievement through his music: he breaks boundaries, shatters barricades. Ultimately, it´s part of the great achievements of Art: go beyond any limits. Even those contained in the synopsis of Mário Peixoto, director of sublime masterpiece in question.

In a small boat adrift, two women and a man recall his recent past. One of the women escaped from prison; the other was desperate; and the man had lost his lover. Tired, they stop paddling and conform with death, recalling (through flashbacks) situations from their past. They have no strength or desire to live and have reached the limit of their existence.

Filmed in 1930, exhibited in 1931. There was no soundtrack (to be played live, simultaneously to projected images) c-u-s-t-o-m for the work. The director would have preferred natural sounds but due to technical problems it was not possible. As has become a contextual tradition, posteriorly universal classical creations were included to serve as audio layer to `Limite'. This unhesitatingly does not compare with an individualized elaboration, as the one made by Melgaço. What really happened in that little boat adrift, is now reinterpreted and retold resonantly by Otacílio.

The ghosts of the past; the acceptance or even the search by death, in other words, the inexorable failure of existence (reaching a limitrophe level) ... Everything gets a unique and abyssal Melgacian version (reaching an unlimitrophe level).

Abyssal. Besides the mesmerizing ´sonorisation´ of precious filmic imagery, there's more. ´One of the most masterful contemporary possible interventions´ is what I think when recently absorb private comments of Otacílio about the making of this album.

The chameleonic composer and multi-instrumentalist has the audacity to sonorously propose a continuity, going beyond the capsizing of the small boat (metaphorically breaking the frontier of all remaining edges).
So quietly / so loudly, he conducts the ´ballet of bodies´ (freed bodies) to the bottom of the sea. And, brilliantly, that's where everything really seems to gain genesis now.

Where the Earth ends.
After the petrified gardens.
After low tide.
Intermingled with the inutile Sea.
Three against the world.
Mundéu." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

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I - Limite (Brazilian Portuguese: meaning "Limit" or "Border") is a film by Brazilian director and writer Mário Peixoto (1908–92), filmed in 1930 and first screened in 1931.

Sometimes cited as the greatest of all Brazilian films, this 120-minute silent experimental feature by novelist Peixoto, who never completed another film, was seen by Orson Welles and won the admiration of everyone from Sergei Eisenstein to Georges Sadoul.

A man and two women lost at sea in a rowboat. Their pasts are conveyed in flashbacks throughout the film. The unusual structure has kept the film in the margins of most film histories, where its been known mainly as a provocative and legendary cult film.

For Peixoto, the experience offered by Limite cannot be adequately captured by language, but was made to be felt. Therefore, the audience is left with images of a synthetic and pure language of cinema;

II - Mário Rodrigues Breves Peixoto was mainly known for his only film Limite, a silent experimental film filmed in 1930 and premiered in Rio de Janeiro on 17 May 1931. Peixoto wrote, directed and took up a minor role in the film.

The single-handedly achievement of a member of the well-to-do élite of 1920s Brazil, Limite became over the years almost a myth - its only copy being almost lost during the 1950s, were it not to be restored thanks to the personal efforts of two 1970s critics - and the object of various legends, many of them put into circulation by Peixoto himself. One such legend referred to a bogus complimentary article about the film ("A film from South America"), that had supposedly been written by Sergei Eisenstein and published, in English translation, in the trendy Londoner magazine Tatler. Only after Peixoto admmited, shortly before his death, that he had himself written the supposed "Portuguese translation" of "Eisenstein's" article, was the general credence given to this legend in Brazil withdrawn.

Nevertheless, the restoration of the surviving copy and renewed viewing in the 1970s and 1980s restored interest in the actual movie. In 1988, the Cinemateca Brasileira named it best Brazilian film of all times. In 1995 Limite was once again as such, according to a national inquiry held by the newspaper Folha de São Paulo.

In 1996, director and producer Walter Salles founds the hoard of documents and props that was to become the Mário Peixoto Archive in a stash at his firm VideoFilmes in Rio, where currently Saulo Pereira de Mello takes care of the original manuscripts and objects . Pereira de Mello also edits publications by and on Peixoto. Onde a terra acaba ("At the edge of the earth"), the title of one among Peixoto’s unfinished projects, is also the name of a 2001 documentary film on Peixoto, directed by Salles' former aide Sérgio Machado.

Around the same period in which Limite was being planned 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 had 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 and only novel, O inútil de cada um (re-edited in 1996). From 1968 on Mário reworked his 1933 original, using it as a basis for an intended extended version that was to be divided in six volumes. So far only the first volume, O inútil de cada um – Itamar has been published in 1984, through the personal 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.

In November 2010, a further restoration of Limite will premiere in Brooklyn, New York;

III - Watch the uncut film:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC98lXsJrBQ

...for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
Wikipedia was the main source...

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Between two parentheses...
(Atonalism, Twelve-Tone, Serialism, Musique Concrète... Acousmatic. Eletroacoustic. Magnetic Tape. Expressionism, New Objectivity, Hyperrealism, Abstractionism, Neoclassicism, Neobarbarism, Futurism, Mythic Method. Electronic...Computer Music, Spectral, Polystylism, Neoromanticism, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism...are addressed by Melgaço. Paradoxically New Simplicity and New Complexity also.
Art Rock, Free Jazz, Ethnic Dialects, Street Sounds are occasional syntax elements.
All the possibilities mentioned above and others that were not mentioned are the usual accoutrements of the composer/instrumentalist to establish his ´babelic´ glossary. We can prove this in a short passage of a single composition up along the entirety of a conceptual phonograph album. All distributed over a career and idiosyncratic records. Have we a universe before us and I propose to see it through a telescope, not a microscope.
I propose not handle very specialized topics here. Otherwise would be, with the exception of musicians and scholars, all hostages of a hermetic jargon. Because more important is to present Otacílio Melgaço to the general public and not to a segment of specialists. Faction of experts not need presentations, depart for the enjoyment beforehand. For this reason there is no niche here for intellectual onanism and encrypted musical terminology. The reason for these parentheses is to establish such elucidation. The non-adoption of technicalities leads to more panoramic, amplifier reviews. Are You always welcome. Those who do not dominate contemporary music and are introduced to the world of ubiquitous O.M. [autodidact and independent artist who, being more specific, does not belong to schools or doctrines; artist who makes Music and that´s enough; music devoid of labels or stylistic, chronological, historical paradigms or trends] and Those who belong to the métier and turn to enjoy propositions they know and also delving into advanced Melgacian sound cosmogonies...
I conclude poetically. ´Certeza/Certainty´ by Octavio Paz. ´Si es real la luz blanca De esta lámpara, real La mano que escribe, ¿son reales
Los ojos que miran lo escrito? De una palabra a la otra Lo que digo se desvanece. Yo sé que estoy vivo Entre dos paréntesis.´ If it is real the white light from this lamp, real the writing hand, are they real, the eyes looking at what I write? From one word to the other what I say vanishes. I know that I am alive between two parentheses.
We´re all more and more a-l-i-v-e now.)
- P.S.P.

credits

released January 1, 2015

Hear more here:
soundcloud.com/otaciliomelgaco

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M e l g a ç o {conception | composition | arrangement | synopsis | instrumentation | orchestration | engineering & sound design | art design | production | direction}

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Otacílio Melgaço Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Composer, Arranger, Conductor, Multi-
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