12 Years a Slave Review From Reputable Source
D irected past the British creative person and film-maker Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave has gained most universal disquisitional praise. In his review for the New Yorker, David Denby echoed the consensus opinion when he described it as "easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery".
But in America many people accept asked why it has taken and so long for a motion picture to do justice to the appalling plight of African America'south slave ancestors and why no US motion-picture show-makers have succeeded earlier in confronting their country's shameful past with such unflinching power and historical accuracy. Multifariousness said information technology was a "disgrace" that, after so long, it has taken "a British director to stare the event in its face up".
By turns visually beautiful and viscerally brutal, 12 Years a Slave is based on the autobiography of Solomon Northup, a free homo from upstate New York, who was lured to Washington DC in 1841, kidnapped and sold into slavery. He quickly learns that if he is to survive, he must renounce his educational activity, stop pleading for his liberty and endure a regime of unspeakable violence.
The picture show stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Northup and Michael Fassbender as the ferociously sadistic slave master Edwin Epps – both actors, along with McQueen and the film itself, are tipped to win Oscars. McQueen has explored the psychological and physical torments of confinement before in Hunger, his flick well-nigh Bobby Sands's hunger strike. And he has plumbed the murky depths of male person sexuality in Shame. But here he brings together both those elements and much more in a way that is guaranteed to stupor and motion audiences.
The historical consultant on the film was the distinguished historian, literary critic and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who was also the consultant on Steven Spielberg'southward film of slave revolt, Amistad. In the 1990s Gates became an academic star in America, revolutionising African-American studies and bringing together at Harvard a and then-called "dream team" of black intellectuals that featured, among others, Cornel West and Kwame Anthony Appiah. His considerable creative output includes books, documentaries and, for a flow in the late 1990s, a number of celebrated journalistic pieces for the New Yorker.
He has been chosen "the chief interpreter of the black experience for white America", although he would prefer to emphasise his professional person commitment to the blackness customs.
In recent years he has turned to genealogy and DNA testing to uncover the African-American histories buried by slavery. A cinephile who nurtured babyhood dreams of becoming a film director, Gates has called 12 Years a Slave "the most bright and accurate portrayal of American slavery ever captured on screen".
The competition for that title has not been cracking. Equally a historian of the genre, Gates knows better than most that American (and British colonial) slave history has too often been sanitised and even sentimentalised on film, including in such classics as Gone With the Wind.
"Steve'southward film," he says, "is a refreshingly honest depiction of slavery equally it really was."
Q&A with Henry Louis Gates
How did y'all get involved with Steve McQueen and 12 Years a Slave?
With Steve, we were sort of 2 ships in the night for years. As a student of cultural studies and blackness British art, I knew about him and his work. I'd written virtually the black renaissance in U.k. and I had long admired his work every bit a visual creative person. Only we had never met. I later found out that he had read some of my piece of work such as The Signifying Monkey in higher. Steve called me terminal summer and we had a long conversation. Since then I've talked to him 2 dozen times. But nosotros didn't finally encounter until the Toronto moving picture festival. Information technology was a big disappointment to miss the wrap party. Of course I wanted to run across Brad Pitt!
Equally for the picture show, I got a phone call from the producer, Jeremy Kleiner. He asked me if I would be a consultant. I read Solomon Northup in graduate schoolhouse. I accept edited a series of Penguin books chosen the black classics, which included 12 Years a Slave. Then I said to Jeremy: "Sure, I'd be happy to." I'd already been consultant for Steven Spielberg on Amistad, and then I knew the drill. I read the script and I thought it was brilliant. I'd known about [American writer and manager] John Ridley before, just never read ane of his scripts. Then I became actively involved with the texts at the cease of the flick.
Could you lot envisage the book every bit a motion-picture show?
Well, there was a TV picture made of it already in 1984. So it's non a surprise to anyone who's watched PBS. Information technology just wasn't a Hollywood film. I remember Avery Brooks [as lead character Solomon Northup] did an amazing job. And although I haven't watched it over again, it was to my cognition the first time a slave narrative was made into a feature film. There were exactly 101 slave narratives written past avoiding slaves between 1760 and 1865 and another 101 published subsequently 1865. So there were 202 written accounts by old slaves and only 1 slave narrative has been made into a characteristic film.
In recent years, in that location has been Spielberg's Lincoln , which deals at least discursively with the effect of slavery, and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained , which is rather more explicit. And at present 12 Years A Slave. Why exercise you recall slavery has suddenly become a cinematic subject?
Lincoln is in a different category, merely Steven Spielberg made a brilliant choice past fugitive a biopic. Simply it's simply indirectly well-nigh slavery. There take in fact been dozens of films about slavery. Well-nigh of them apologetic films. The moonbeams and magnolia fantasies of white dominance. One key example is The Nascence of a Nation, which shows how lascivious and rapacious and venal black people were. They had to be controlled by slavery; if not, they would rape white women. That was conspicuously a white racist fantasy.
And so you accept black power fantasies such equally Mandingo, in which the black male takes revenge on the white woman with his irresistible sexuality. And then it'south non the subject matter that makes Steve'due south film or Quentin's picture unique. It'south the way they address slavery. And they accost slavery in polar opposite means. I did a three-function interview with Quentin for [online magazine of African-American civilisation] The Root that went viral. I looked at the questions, raised in Django, of whether slaves rode horses and if dogs ever ate slaves [yes and yes – in Haiti]. The fury over Django reminds me of Georg Lukács's statement over modernism and realism in the 30s. Quentin Tarantino made the globe'southward first postmodern slave spaghetti western and probably the last. Steve'due south film is very different – it's a realist accept on slavery.
But I think Quentin deserved the best screenplay Academy Award for Django and I think John Ridley deserves information technology this yr. And Steve best director. And Chiwetel Ejiofor [who plays Solomon in the new moving picture] for best actor. I asked Steve how Chiwetel accomplished so much with his optics and he said he got him to study Rudolph Valentino films. I besides remember Michael Fassbender should win best supporting actor but, hey, I'yard biased.
Just coming back to Hollywood'south interest in slavery – curiously, nosotros have more historical scholarship about the slave trade than always before. Thank you to people similar Professor David Eltis, we now know there were more than than 36,000 voyages from Africa to the new world. The detail of the data is really quite remarkable. So the slave merchandise is a subject whose fourth dimension has come up. Steve says it's the Obama effect. Many people have said there is a renaissance in black film. I think it's partly about the coming of historic period of the affirmative-action generation, the people who were able to become into white institutions then first black studies programmes in the university. My generation or the students later united states of america. That is probably the most important gene in terms of the nation. You have to call back the black middle class has quadrupled. And then that's besides a big increase in consumers.
What do you retrieve the legacy of slavery is in terms of the black experience in America today?
In 1860, when the last federal census earlier the civil war was held, in that location were 4.4 million African Americans, only 10% of whom were free. So right there yous have the breakdown of the talented tenth [the term popularised by Spider web Du Bois as a reference to the black American leaders required to elevator black Americans out of poverty and discrimination]. Where in other communities there has been a tripartite class organization, that has not obtained for the black customs. Instead, it's remained a 90/ten split. The percentage of blacks living nether the poverty line is almost the aforementioned equally when Martin Luther Male monarch was killed.
I made a TV serial about African American history called Many Rivers to Cross. If you look at the concluding episode, you think it would cease with the triumph of Obama's election. I even have Colin Powell crying on camera when I ask him how he felt near Obama being elected. But and so we cease with a black man unjustly imprisoned for eleven years, arrested on a trumped-up accuse of concealing cocaine on a bus. It's the new Jim Crow, as Michelle Alexander called information technology, the horrendously huge population of [imprisoned] blackness males. It'south the best of times for the black customs. It'southward the worst of times. I'm hoping that 12 Years a Slave serves equally an allegory of what it is like to be a free human being being kidnapped and falsely imprisoned. And this would be the example of all these men in prison house every bit a effect of the iii-strikes laws [which have meant that a petty criminal offense can lead to a life sentence if the offender has been found guilty of two previous crimes].
One of the qualities of slavery that the movie illustrates is the manner in which violence is normalised and so that empathy becomes a luxury that few can afford to feel. Do you recollect this brutalisation continues to affect blackness America? Well, in that location is a scene in the flick, what I call the tippy-toe scene, when Solomon is suspended past his neck and has to balance on his toes. Merely i slave, a woman, gives him h2o. Only one slave comes to his aid. So that's it exactly. There were e'er people defeated by the system. And always people who transcended the organisation. There's no magic formula for it. Should we be surprised that a system that started in the British colonies in the 1690s and didn't end to 1865 and was so followed by a century of Jim Crow has an ongoing issue? Apparently, the black customs has never had more power than information technology has today. Merely too big a segment of the black customs is economically disenfranchised.
The African slave trade is ofttimes discussed as a trouble almost unique to the U.s., but in fact less than 5% of slaves ended up in the US. How did slavery in the Usa compare with slavery elsewhere in the Americas?
The figures are that 12.five one thousand thousand Africans got on the boats; 10.vii million got off the boats – the balance died at sea in appalling conditions. Of the remainder, 388,000 came to the U.s.. To get some perspective on that, Jamaica got a million and Brazil six million. The reason we think of it as an American phenomenon is the visible power of the ceremonious rights motion in America. Fifty-fifty I was shocked. If you lot asked me when I was a graduate, I would have thought the U.s. had a much larger share. Subsequently the importation of slaves was made illegal in the US [in 1808], slave owners turned to breeding slaves. Just in other countries, it was cheaper to supplant slaves from Africa than breed them. It was fell in America merely you were encouraged to accept a family. There was a premium on keeping slaves live and accept them reproduce. Information technology was much more roughshod in other places.
It's hard to think of how much more brutal slavery could have been than that depicted in 12 Years a Slave. From a crude cost-benefit analysis, the slave owner'south horrendous treatment of his slaves seemed counterproductive. I retrieve we tin run into the contradictions inherent in slave buying through Michael Fassbender'due south bright portrayal of Edwin Epps [the cruel plantation possessor to whom Solomon is sold]. When I saw the way he rendered him it was a revelation. My god, it's in the text of Solomon's book and I didn't recollect of it that way. At that place has never been a slave main in the history of Hollywood portrayed with more than depth. He comes off every bit a man inexplicably in love with a slave [Patsey, 1 of the women employed on the plantation] and he tin't figure out why. He virtually beats her to death and rapes her. He is insanely jealous. I think these are the contradictions at the heart of owning another human existence.
You lot've become something of an proficient in genealogy, including your own. I read that you were 56% white, 37% African and 7% Native American. Why is black ancestry then oftentimes seen equally the decisive cistron in determining ethnic identity?
That was measured by the erstwhile organization. It goes like this now: I'1000 50% European and 50% African. But the point about blackness identity, that'south a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Information technology'south chosen the "ane driblet" principle, in which one drop of black blood defined yous equally black. It'due south preserved curiously enough by people who believe in essentialised racial identities besides every bit many blackness people who y'all would think would oppose it. For black people, they wanted their group to be as large as possible – because more people equals more power – and therefore they didn't want anyone to escape. And the white people, they wanted to go along their bloodlines pure. But I have news for them: the bloodlines have never been pure. 30 five per cent of all African American men descend from white people – just similar I exercise. The admixture of the average African American is almost 20% European. That means because of slavery we are a very mixed people, the African Americans. Simply and then are white people. Virtually v% of white people, if they had their Deoxyribonucleic acid checked, would be kicked out of their race. These classifications are erstwhile habits of a racist order that are difficult to break.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/05/12-years-a-slave-america-shameful-past
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