Directed by Himself: Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave (original) (raw)
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.
12 Years a Slave as a Bridge to Primary Source Research
Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments
This historical analysis essay on the film 12 Years a Slave and several primary sources bridges earlier skills-based writing prompts with the final research project. It asks students to practice several essential writing moves that reflect the disciplinary approach of historians, without forgetting the concerns of film studies and literature scholars, and even filmmakers. Such moves include conducting careful primary source analysis and interrogation as a historian would; beginning to find sources on…
History Education Research Journal
We have studied how eliciting historical empathy in a class of 13th grade students through using the film 12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2013) supported their in-depth understanding of slavery in nineteenth-century USA. Historical empathy is one of the core elements of the new curricular reform implemented from 2020 in Norway, and it is believed to have potential to strengthen: (1) students’ future citizenship and participation in democratic and multicultural societies; and (2) students’ in-depth understanding of history. We implemented a five-week lesson plan with different activities based around the film, and used students’ assignments to evaluate their feelings about the lessons and their historical understanding of slavery. The results confirmed the potential of film to enhance historical empathy when the screening is well prepared and combined with relevant activities. Students demonstrated a high level of engagement and managed to perform complex tasks. Both their ability to cont...
Cultural Studies Review, 1970
The task of remembering the transatlantic slave trade poses a particular challenge to historians and artists alike. Not only does it revolve around an emotionally and ideologically loaded issue, there is also rather little documentary and testimonial evidence to draw upon, particularly so regarding the Africans’ view of the trade. To make things worse, the most important and often quoted source – the second chapter of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) dealing partly with life in the belly of a slave ship – has recently been uncovered to be probably ‘fictional’ rather than based on personal experience. On the one hand, the arts are particularly called for in this situation to fill the documentary gaps and silences through acts of experiment and imagination, and they may indeed have a redemptive effect by offering, in Hayden White’s terms, successful ‘emplotments’ of a traumatic past. One the other hand, this redemptive potential simultaneously poses a serious ethical ch...
READING IMAGES OF THE VIOLENCE OF IN 12 YEARS A SLAVE
Research journal of English Language and literature(RJELAL) KY publication, 2021
The Main aim of present study is to examine the paradoxical instability of realist images of the trauma and violence of slavery and the discourse that surrounds them within a larger lineage of the history and politics imbedded in the depiction of slavery McQueen's 12years a slave. Further, Image of violence in the movie represents the oppressive attitudes and cultural biasness of white people towards the black people. This study textually analyses the images of racial violence through the Althusser's concept of ISA (Ideological State Apparatus): social rule, costume, human desires, languages, racial ideology, through which white rules over black people, as finding, these state's agencies oppress the Aspirations of common people. This movie presents all the black characters are suffering from white people on the name of racial discourse. Black people have to suffer and departed from their family due to extreme control of white people. The image of violence presents the condition of black lively, on the whole, all the evidential picture represents the long journey of racial freedom, as representative of black community, Solomon running there to get hope, freedom. The common black people like Solomon compels to follows white oppression, they repeatedly practice it, in long run they became habitual over such racial discourse then black people hegemonized by them. Though black people became victim of racial discourse, people like Solomon uses their technology of self to get freedom ultimately. Therefore, the finding of the study suggests that getting freedom is possible even in adverse situation if a person has early forms of self-knowledge that prepares the way for achievement.