Over the past twenty years, Brazilian film scholars have exhaustively studied the historical works on our cinema produced from the second half of the 20th century. Significant advances have been made in this process, however, the challenge of moving beyond merely refuting the “classical historiography” of Brazilian film still remains, especially due to the marginalization of reflection on the historicity of the works analyzed. For this reason, based on Michel de Certeau’s (2007) reflections on the historian’s “place” in history and Reinhart Koselleck’s (2006) categories of “space of experience” and “horizon of expectations”, this article aims to theoretically and methodologically problematize the work Introduction to brazilian film (1959) by the critic and filmmaker Alex Viany (1918-1992). With the objective of investigating its place of production and recovering its historicity, we aim to emphasize in Viany the procedures of adherence or not to ideological and thematic perspectives, his proposition of notions and concepts, as well as his construction of cuts and contexts for the history of Brazilian cinema.