To Think a Critic-Filmmaker

A Look to Mauro, Humberto alongside the texts of David Neves

Abstract

In a “life dedicated to the tasks of cinema”, the critic-filmmaker David Neves constituted a particular cinematographic project manifested both in his films and in his work in politics and film criticism. In this article, the core of the problem is the transition to cinematographic direction by the collaborator in films and in the definition of Cinema Novo, who until then worked as a producer and photographer, as well as a well-known critic associated with the movement. Thus, in the light of the approach proposed by the Theory of Filmmakers, we seek to highlight how attention to the thinking of the filmmaker-critic can be an interesting gateway to the study of his cinematographic style. Such a style emerges autonomously through the assumption of interests already manifested in his texts and through his own project around the figuration of filmmaker Humberto Mauro. Through comparisons between Neves' writings and the stylistic choices in his first short film Mauro, Humberto (1966), we take his texts, of various natures, as important direct sources and spaces for exposing his paradigms for the practice of cinema, aiming to lay the foundations for a different look, attentive to the specificity of the work of the critic-filmmaker around his own notion of “error”.