Directed by Himself: Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave (original) (raw)
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Twelve Years a Slave and the ‘Unthinkability’ of Enslaved Autobiography
Biography and History in Film, 2019
When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, some pundits argued that it heralded a new 'post-racial' era. To say that was wishful thinking would be a gross understatement. But it is quite clear that in the late 2000s and early 2010s popular interest in the history of slavery and race in the United States was on the rise. In the eighteen months preceding the release of director Steve McQueen's Twelve Years a Slave, the New York Times ran over two hundred articles focused on American and New World slavery, on topics ranging from First Lady Michelle Obama's genealogy to Walmart's plan to build a superstore on a slave burial ground in Alabama. Scholarly interest was also on the rise, invigorated by a new generation of historians concerned with the role of slavery in the making of American capitalism. But perhaps most importantly, McQueen's film was released eighteen months after the shooting of the unarmed seventeen year-old Trayvon Martin attracted international attention to the issue of white violence toward African Americans. The anti-racist organization Black Lives Matter was founded only weeks before the film appeared. The release of McQueen's film in August 2013 was therefore quite timely, its tone and content very much in step with both popular interests and academic trends. Twelve Years a Slave went on to win three Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and a host of other honours, including Best Picture at the Golden Globes and Best Film from BAFTA. Based on Solomon Northup's classic 1853 slave narrative of the same name, the film almost took a radically different form. As Steve McQueen tells it, the idea for filming a story about a free northern man being kidnapped into slavery in the Deep South emerged before its 2 producers became acquainted with Northup's narrative. He actually worked on the concept for some time with screenwriter John Ridley but reached a dead end. It was only then that McQueen's wife suggested working from historical documents, which led to his discovery of Northup. 'I was pretty upset with myself that I didn't know this book,' he later said, 'and slowly but surely I realized that most people, in fact all the people I knew, did not know this book' (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Steve McQueen, interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, October 24, 2013). McQueen can certainly be forgiven for not knowing of Northup's narrative-relatively few non-academics did prior to the making of the film. But his confessed inability to conceive of finding an actual autobiography on which to base his film calls to mind Michel Rolph Trouillot's observation on the Haitian Revolution as an event that was 'unthinkable even as it happened'. 1 After all, autobiography and biography presume personhood, while slavery, in its abstract logic if not in actual practice, denied the personhood of its subjects. This assumption has led to what some historians have called a 'chain of silence' regarding slavery, or the invisibility of enslaved people as historical subjects, worsened by the persistence of racism. McQueen's admission speaks to a host of interrelated issues concerning black autobiography and biography from the era of slavery, issues that in many respects carried over to the film. These include the reliability and veracity of the slave testimony and the related question of authorial voice. So while McQueen's version of Twelve Years a Slave is a mostly faithful adaptation of Northup's original narrative, it does not grapple with some of the more difficult issues surrounding slave autobiography. McQueen is not to be faulted for this. Commercial cinema should not be judged by academic criteria, and addressing these issues would have resulted in a very different film. But that is actually the point: it is difficult to reconcile the divergent imperatives of commercial feature film and the
Racial Discrimination Toward African-American in Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave
2020
The movie entitled 12 Years a Slave movie written by John Ridley and directed by Steve McQueen is a movie about the African-American, Solomon Northup, being a slave. This movie is reflection of the real social condition in the era of 1981s such as gets an unequal treatment or discriminative attitudes through the colonizer in United States. The purpose of this study is to uncover the racial discrimination toward the character. As an African-American writer, Ridley depicted a story about an African-American freeman character enslaved in the United States for 12 years. Ridley argues that this condition gives the African-American character to get a position of being mistreated and being segregated in the society. To analyze this novel, the theory of Ali Rattansi (2007) is used to support the concept of the racial discrimination. The result of this study shows that the African-American character in 12 Years a Slave suffers from the racial discrimination trough the mistreated by the superior and also, they are being segregated in society, and finally it leads his existence as the minority.
(Running List)- Representations of Slavery in Film, Media, and the Performing Arts
2020
Collecting these resources was inspired by my teaching an advanced undergraduate course entitled “Slavery in Film and Media” in Spring 2020. I am always seeking to add to the list, and hold a particular interest in accessing non-English material that does not focus upon the British/Anglo-American experience. I developed this list for the benefit of public knowledge and to encourage educators to include visual/audible media in their classrooms. Everyone is welcome to add to this list. If you have something to add (or subtract, if you believe one doesn’t apply) please tweet to me @ProfTDParry or email me at tyler.parry@unlv.edu.
The Horrors of Slavery and Crisis of Humanity in Amistad and 12 Years a Slave
2014
Abstract: Solomon Northup’s testimonial 12 Years a Slave (1853) tells the heart-wrenching story of how a free black man living in New York was captured by slave traders and forced to live as a slave on southern plantations in the 1840s under inhuman and oppressive conditions. Writing up and publishing his experiences, Northup presents a searing portrayal of the evils of slavery that influenced abolitionist arguments and movements in the pre-Civil War period as debates over slavery intensified, leading to the bloodiest war in American history. The horrors of slavery created a crisis of humanity in the United States in which a class of Americans participated in slave-holding, a practice that was seen in some parts of the country as causing a crisis of humanity in which millions were subjected to inhuman living working and living conditions. While the U.S. constitution and American revolution had produced “liberty and justice for all,” and proclaimed equal rights before the law obviously the system of slavery created a crisis for U.S. constitutional democracy that led to a Civil War that almost tore the country apart. Hollywood cinema has traditionally been reluctant to portray the horrors of slavery, providing idealizations of slavery in films like Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939), and tending to ignore it during the highly charged post-World War II period that featured an intensifying powerful Civil Rights movement. Steve McQueen’s 2013 film provides a powerful cinematic rendition of Northup’s 12 Years a Slave and has been affirmed as one of the one most powerful films on slavery ever produced, a film being nominated for and winning multiple awards as I write in winter 2014. In this article, I will contrast Gordon Parks’ relatively unknown PBS “American Experience” film of 1984 Solomon Northup’s Odyssey with McQueen’s film, although I open with a look back at Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997), which presents a 1839 slave revolt on a ship bound to the Americas and the subsequent trial of the rebels. The Amistad rebellion and trial, like Northup’s book, influenced the abolitionist movement and is a significant, although often forgotten moment in U.S. history. Hence, the current discussions of McQueen’s highly acclaimed film provide the opportunity for a look backwards at a painful moment in U.S. history and for discussion of different modes of cinematic representation of slavery and how a crisis of humanity in the U.S. has received different modes of cinematic representation. Accordingly, I will contrast Spielberg’s film with Parks’ and McQueen’s presentations of slavery in their versions of Northup’s 12 Years a Slave. Although Spielberg’s Amistadcontains many features of dominant American ideology and an individualist Hollywood narrative which informs Spielberg’s liberal cinema, it is perhaps the most modernist and one of the most compelling of Spielberg’s films that deserves a second look and comparison with Park and McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. I will, however, first examine Amistad which provides a broader panorama of the system and complex effects of slavery in U.S. life and history than Parks’ powerful narrative of Northup’s book and McQueen’s more concentrated and intense focus on the horrors of slavery in 12 Years a Slave. I contrast Parks’ use of classical realist modes of representation with McQueen’s aestheticized and modernist version. Juxtaposing different cinematic representations of slavery and cinematic renditions of Northup’s slave testimony, I show how McQueen’s film provides a modernist version of Northup’s text that forces the audience to experience the horrors of slavery and crisis of humanity, while Parks uses a conventional realist narrative to tell Northup’s story and depict the institutions of slavery. These films, I believe, are among the best English-language cinematic efforts to engage the “peculiar” and arguably monstrous American institution of slavery that continues to shape our history today into the Obama era. Resumen: El testimonio personal de Solomon Northup en 12 años de esclavitud (1853) relata de manera desgarradora la captura de un afroamericano libre, ciudadano de Nueva York, a manos de unos traficantes de esclavos y su traslado a las plantaciones del sur en la década de 1840, donde inicia una nueva vida en condiciones inhumanas y opresivas. En sus memorias, Northup recrea el escenario ominoso de la esclavitud en los años previos a la Guerra de Secesión, lacra que encendió los argumentos del movimiento abolicionista e intensificó los debates en torno a la esclavitud, hasta el punto de conducir a la nación a una de las guerras más sangrientas de la historia estadounidense. Los horrores de la esclavitud han provocado una crisis de humanidad en la conciencia nacional. En determinados territorios del país, una clase social contaba con esclavos en propiedad y esta práctica sometió a una vida inhumana a millones de personas. Si bien tanto la Constitución como la Revolución se habían obrado bajo el lema “libertad y justicia para todos” (“liberty and justice for all”), y habían proclamado la igualdad de derechos ante la ley, la institución esclavista originó una crisis democrática y constitucional que desgarró el país con una guerra civil. Tradicionalmente, el cine estadounidense, y Hollywood en particular, se han mostrado reacios a retratar los horrores de la esclavitud e incluso han proporcionado idealizaciones de la esclavitud en películas como El nacimiento de una nación (1915) y Lo que el viento se llevó (1939). Tras la segunda guerra mundial, Hollywood tendió a ignorar el tema durante un período en que, sin embargo, surgió un poderoso movimiento a favor de los derechos civiles. La película de Steve McQueen producida en 2013 ofrece una versión cinematográfica del relato autobiográfico de Northup, también titulada 12 años de esclavitud. Sin duda se trata de uno de los filmes más impactantes jamás realizados, nominado en 2014 a nueve Óscar y finalmente premiado por la Academia de Hollywood con el galardón a la mejor producción, a la mejor actriz de reparto y al mejor guion original. El presente trabajo se propone establecer un contraste entre la película de McQueen y Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, un título relativamente desconocido, realizado por Gordon Parks en 1984. Además, en este contexto crítico, se ofrece una retrospectiva del filme de Steven Spielberg Amistad (1997), que relata la revuelta de esclavos ocurrida en 1839 a bordo de un barco negrero en aguas caribeñas y el posterior juicio a los rebeldes. Como el libro de Northup, el caso de la goleta “Amistad” también influyó decisivamente en el movimiento abolicionista, aunque se trate de un episodio a menudo olvidado. Por este motivo, el éxito y el debate ocasionados por 12 años de esclavitud ofrecen un contexto propicio para revisitar uno de los momentos más dolorosos de la historia del país y, al mismo tiempo, examinar de manera crítica las distintas representaciones cinematográficas de la esclavitud en cuanto crisis de humanidad. Es posible que Amistad contenga numerosos tópicos de la ideología norteamericana dominante, así como una visión individualista típica de Hollywood que se mezcla informa el cine más progresista de Spielberg. Sin embargo, quizás sea también el más innovador de cuantos ha realizado y uno de los más sugerentes e impactantes, factores que lo hacen merecedor de una segunda mirada y de una comparación crítica con los títulos de Park y de McQueen. En primer lugar se examinará Amistad, que proporciona un panorama más amplio del sistema esclavista así como los complicados efectos históricos de la esclavitud, por encima del poderoso retrato de Park y el reciente filme de McQueen, más centrado en la descripción del horror humano. Se contrastará el realismo clásico propio de la representación de Parks con la versión de McQueen, esteticista y modernista. Al contraponer diferentes representaciones fílmicas de la esclavitud en torno al testimonio de Northup, se mostrará cómo el filme de McQueen proporciona una versión modernista del texto autobiográfico que empuja a la audiencia a experimentar los horrores de la esclavitud, mientras Parks emplea una visión narrativa convencional en su representación de la esclavitud a través del relato de Northup. En mi opinión, las tres películas son una muestra de los mejores esfuerzos realizados en lengua inglesa para recrear la monstruosa institución esclavista durante la era Obama.
African Slavery in Documentary Films
Journal of Global Slavery, 2020
The last two decades have witnessed much scholarly debate around discursive and non-discursive legacies of African slavery, as well as a growing interest in memories of slavery from the African continent.1 At the same time, an increas-1 A large body of publications has emerged on slavery in the African continent, including among others: Martin A. Klein, "Studying the History of Those Who Would Rather Forget:
Journal of Popular Culture, 2019
This article examines the revisionist slavery film cycle produced in response to the Black Power era’s contentious racial politics and industrial destabilizations. Promising to show slavery’s realities – slaves’ abuse, white racism, and Black resistance – these films used interracial sex and violence to revise plantation stereotypes courting exploitational appeal. Considering the multiple iterations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin – a 1965 European co-production recut and re-issued twice by American exploitation distributors in line with the Blaxploitation boom -- I track the cycle’s evolving production and promotional tactics and representations of blackness and interracial sex as it overlapped increasingly with Blaxploitation and sexploitation trends.