Work and Utopia: Antônio Vieira missionary

Abstract

This article will discuss the image of Antônio Vieira, the “Emperor of the Portuguese language”, in the words of Fernando Pessoa, featured in the movie Word and Utopia (2000), by Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, in contrast to some of the Jesuit biographies and analyzing one of the choices of literary excerpts that compose the film’s diegesis. Because it favors their missionary side, of the defense of Indians and blacks slaves in colonial Brazil, the film turns out to set up a visionary and actual Vieira. A Vieira far ahead of his time, holding a humanistic discourse avant la lettre, whose practical development only begin to spread after the French Revolution and in Brazil only gain official status after signing the Lei Áurea, of 1988, after almost two hundred years of the death of Vieira. Manoel de Oliveira finds in the context of the celebrations of 500 years of “discovery” of Brazil occasion to revisit this character of our common past and rethink this important figure of the Lusophone universe.