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Analysis of 12 years a slave
Analysis of 12 years a slave
Analysis of 12 years a slave
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12 Years a Slave is the most powerful and moving American slavery movie of all time. Although it’s a big statement, it is an accurate one. The film leaves you feeling as though you have just experienced slavery. The historical and biographical film tells the story of Solomon Northup who was kidnapped, sold into slavery and put to work for 12 years before his release. This film is gory and horrific but really tells the story of the past. This film will exceed any expectations.
Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace does not begin to compare to 12 Years a Slave’s accurate re-telling of American history and is more based on dramatized storyline for the interest of the viewers than the truth. In this case, 12 Years a Slave did an astoundingly better job. Although far off, in movies such as James Wan’s Saw franchise, viewers take enjoyment in watching people killed and tortured as if it’s an enjoyable sport. This is
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not the case when watching 12 Years a Slave. There is no enjoyment when you can no longer distinguish a human’s back because they have been constantly whipped for wanting to wash their body with soap. There is no enjoyment watching someone’s toes only just able to touch the ground while being hung by a rope for someone else’s lies and wrong doings. McQueen has been criticized for the film being “too hard to watch” but his storyline proves nothing but enthralling.
The honesty and depth of 12 Years a Slave is what teaches today’s people the true history of apartheid and slavery and McQueen deserves a round of applause for this. It is the director’s job to evoke the viewer’s emotions - though they do not have to be of enjoyment and happiness. McQueen has done exactly this in an extraordinary way to teach the horrendousness of our own past to today’s society. In his past movies, he hasn’t been known to be too scared to make the audience feel uncomfortable and that he isn’t willing to sugar-coat the story for the viewers. Why should we not be exposed to the true facts of our past? The film portrayed Solomon Northup’s family (a black family) as living wealthily and happily in New York amongst the white people and having no issues. This is not commonly seen in a film of this time period. Although being a long film, McQueen managed to keep viewers fully interested and focused throughout the whole duration of the
film. The cast should be appreciated considerably more for their ability to re-enact the lowest level of inhumane actions that there has ever been with exceptional acting. This includes both the slaves and the slave owners. Chiwitel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup and Lupita Nyong’o as slave Patsey excelled my expectations in their performances. The supporting cast is full of big names including Benedict Cumberbatch, Sarah Paulson, Brad Pitt and Paul Dano and they all turn in outstanding performance. The issue with having such big faces is having the viewer no longer seeing them in character but as their celebrity face, but this is not a problem in this film. Not only did the characters look authentic, but so did the setting. The film was mostly based in the Red River Region of Louisiana. In the 1800’s, slavery existed along the Red River of the South to work at the Oak Alley Plantation and the Magnolia plantation. Although the plantation Northup spent his year slaving away at does not exist today, Magnolia is the nearest of them to the site that Northup wrote about. Inclusively, 12 Years a Slave is an amazing film and one to never forget. It’s that film you always have hammered in the back of your mind when talking about subjects like slavery or apartheid. I recommend everybody watches the film at least once in their lives to get a full understanding of the historical matter as the film is done so remarkably.
Though slightly frivolous to mention merely because of its obviousness but still notably, all the slaves came from the Southern states including and not limited to Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Virginia, South Carolina, and Arkansas. Economically, the United States’ main cash crops—tobacco, rice, sugarcane, and cotton—were cultivated by the slaves who the rich Southerners heavily depended upon. From this perspective establishes a degree of understanding about the unwillingness to abolish slavery and contributes to the reality of the clear division between the agriculturally based South and industrially based North. Having watched the film, I wished the Northern people were more aware of the abuses and dehumanization of the slaves though the saddening reality is that the truth of the slaves’ conditions couldn’t be revealed till much later on because the fear of retaliation and prosecution of the slave owners and white people was very much present. That the slaves’ mistreatment would be considered repulsive and repugnant to the Quakers and abolitionists is made evident the narratives of the slaves read by the different former slaves who elucidated the countless
2. According to Sobchack, contemporary screen violence greatly differs than portrayals of violence in years past. Today, violent scenes are careless and lack significance because we as audiences have become calloused and desensitized to any acts of violence. She states that there is “no grace or benediction attached to violence. Indeed, its very intensity seems diminished” (Sobchack 432). Senseless violence, gruesome acts, and profound amounts of gore are prevalent in movies today, and because even this is not enough, it must be accompanied by loud blasts and noise, constantly moving scenes to keep audiences stimulated and large quantities of violence for viewers to enjoy what they are watching. Decades ago, it was the story that was engaging to audiences and filmmaking was an art.
In today's day and age, it's rare to see famous historical events and societal disasters not be picked apart by film directors and then transformed into a box office hit. What these films do is put a visual perspective on these events, sometimes leaving viewers speculating if whatever was depicted is in fact entirely true. I have never felt that feeling more than after I finished watching Oliver Stone’s JFK.
One could easily dismiss movies as superficial, unnecessarily violent spectacles, although such a viewpoint is distressingly pessimistic and myopic. In a given year, several films are released which have long-lasting effects on large numbers of individuals. These pictures speak
The film 12 Years a Slave takes us into a twelve-year window of Solomon Northup’s life. Its origin comes from Solomon Northup’s book, with the same title, that recounts one fragment of America’s most embarrassing exploits. The film was directed by Steve McQueen and was released in the year 2013. The director chose 12 Years a Slave to work with after much searching for non-fictional story that featured a man who was ripped from his family and forced into slavery. Solomon’s story was just that. Many critics have been praised the film and particularly single out Chiwetel Ekiofor’s performance as the best acting of the year (Solomon Northup).
...s at that time who have come of age. Perhaps no film in recent history has captured more attention and generated more controversial debate. This film resonates the feeling and question that common people had about the JFK assassination in the 60s. As a result, the debate about the validity of JFK extended much further into the war-torn cultural landscape of America in the 1990s than most observers noted. The JFK was a telling incident demonstrating the larger cultural conflict over values and meaning in America and the competition to define national identity. The whole affair demonstrated how effective a motion picture can be as a transmitter of knowledge, history, and culture. As a result, the debate about the validity of JFK extended much further into the war-torn cultural landscape of America in the 1990s than most observers have noted.
This novel was a very long and strenuous read. Solomon included many details about the process of planting and harvesting cotton or the appearance of a man from head to foot, for example. This painted an extremely accurate picture in the reader’s head, however it made the story boring and slow. There were also a lot of old-fashioned words that I had to look up before I understood sentences. Although the novel was slow and old-fashioned, I would recommend this book to students who wished to learn more about this time period because it certainly helps certain aspects easier to comprehend. Twelve Years a Slave gave me a different perspective to slavery, and a different way of viewing it.
In his true-life narrative "Twelve Years a Slave," Solomon Northup is a free man who is deceived into a situation that brings about his capture and ultimate misfortune to become a slave in the south. Solomon is a husband and father. Northup writes:
A cinematic experience offers a false projection of the world that people have the desire to indulge in. In Guy Vanderhaeghe’s novel, The Englishman’s Boy, the portrayal of the film as a whole is consistent with Chance’s vision to rewrite the story of the Cypress Hills Massacre of 1873 as a mythic history of the settling of the American west. Film has the power to access an aspect of reality somehow absent in other media. One could argue that film brainwashes people and alters reality when it is both projected and screened. Vanderhaeghe’s narrative oscillation and use of common literary techniques often foreshadow his film (Besieged) in many ways.
The topic of slavery in the United States has always been controversial, as many people living in the South were supportive of it and many people living in the North were against it. Even though it was abolished by the Civil War before the start of the 20th century, there are still different views on the subject today. Written in 1853, the book Twelve Years a Slave is a first person account of what it was like for Solomon Northup to be taken captive from his free life in the North and sold to a plantation as a slave in the South, and his struggle to regain his freedom. Through writing about themes of namelessness, inhumanity, suffering, distrust, defiance, and the desire for freedom, Northup was able to expose the experiences and realities of slavery.
In Solomon Northup’s narrative, 12 years a slave, he shares a story of the horrors of his past that was a lifelong reality to many African Americans throughout American history. Northup, being a free man of Saratoga, New York, was stripped of his freedom and sold ‘down the river’ to the Bayou Boeuf of Louisiana and was bound to slavery for twelve years. Along with recounting the gruesome hardships and labor that he had to endure, Northup also gives detailed accounts of the lives of fellow slaves that he comes across, primarily, women. Northup’s narrative allows readers to see that the hardships that slave women experienced by far surpassed anything that a slave man could endure. Stripped of their families, beaten relentlessly and forever victims
One of the thing that makes 12 Years a Slave hard to watch is the types of physical abuse and the violence that makes the movie really hard to watch " the violence and trauma of slavery and the image of the tortured slave body. Using his trademark realist cinematographic style, McQueen creates prolonged, unflinching images of slave torture and suffering, lingering on graphic scenes of brutality, including whipping, hanging, beatings " . the American cinema portrayed the slavery in many movies but not in the way 12 Years a Slave did “ isn’t the first movie about slavery in the United States — but it may be the one that finally makes it impossible for American cinema to continue to sell the ugly lies it’s been hawking for more than a century". One of the things that made the film great is the dialogue because it is too deep and full of emotions to reflect the suffering of the African American as a result of the slavery like in scene when Solomon was told by be one of the slaves to keep his identity a secret " Days ago I was with my family, in my home. Now you tell me all is lost. Tell no one who I really am" if I want to survive. I don't want to survive, I want to live " and when Pasty asked Solomon to kill her because she was raped and many times and treated bad by the wife of her master '' All I ask: end my life. Take my body to the margin of the swamp" . There are many symbols we can see them in the movie 12 Years A Slave like the chains and we can see them throughout the movie which represent the physical ,mental and psychological oppression that Solomon and African Americans suffered from because of the slavery. There is another symbol in the movie which is the darkness like when Solomon
Twelve Years a Slave is based on a true story. This book is a narrative of Solomon Northup. Who is he, and what is his identity is all described in this book. The title of this book, Twelve Years a Slave, explains those twelve years, Northup spent in slavery. He was a citizen of New York. Solomon Northup, the protagonist of the story, is born-free African American on July 1808. He is married to Anne Hampton and had three children: Elizabeth, ten years old; Margaret, eight years old; Alonzo, five years old. Solomon Northup was a free man kidnapped into slavery for twelve years in Washington, D.C at the age of 32. Two men named Brown and Hamilton kidnapped him in 1841, offered him a job in circus and drugged him. Shortly after his escape, he published his memoir to great acclaim and brought legal action against his abductors, though they were never prosecuted. Solomon Northup in Twelve Years a Slave is an interesting character because the author displays him as very intelligent & creative, caring& kind and persistent and hopeful person.
In the Following essay I will explore and develop an analysis of how the movie Twelve Years A Slave produces knowledge about the racial discourse. To support my points, I will use “The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures” written by Henrietta Lidchi, a Princeton University text “Introduction: Development and the Anthropology of Modernity” and “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
“A narrative begins with one situation and, through a series of linked transformations, end with a new situation that brings about the end of the narrative” (Gillespie, 2006, p. 81). The trailer for 12 Years a Slave does this. It begins with a Solomon getting captured and forced into slavery. He starts to accept his slavery in the beginning, but then as the trailer goes on, he changes his perspective and starts to regain hope and fight for his freedom. The events that knocked him down in the beginning start to make him stronger and start a fire in his heart that cannot be put out by the slave