Film Analysis Of The Film '12 Years A Slave'

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). At the start of the film we see Solomon already working in the sugarcane fields as a slave. As he reminisces

A couple examples of this would be the scene in which Solomon is nearly hung and the scenes in which songs are sung by the characters. When Solomon is hung he is actually able to reach the muddy ground by standing on his tiptoes. The scene continues for an uncomfortably long period as we see the other plantation workers continue about their business. All but one of the workers stayed away. There was one girl who came to give him water later that day. This scene seemed have deeper meaning than just the events of one man’s life. I believe the director used this gruesome act in contrast to the alluring background to make an allusion to how atrocities can occur in the most seemingly beautiful places. In the case of the songs, there are two important ones to be analyzed, “Run, Nigger, Run” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” In the first song, the slaver Tibeats sings this runaway song to comment on how futile it is for slaves to try and get away. He basically aims to break their spirits. By the look on the slaves’ faces we can see their scorn and hopelessness. In the second song, we see Solomon make one of his most important decisions. Through this song we sense his renewed power and determination to be continue on. After watching this film it becomes easy to so how his visionary capacity led to his receiving of the Acadamy Award for Best Picture. It is also of note that he is the first black director to receive this

The director succeeded in giving us enough information to gain an accurate depiction of Christianity during this period of time and to provide a literary aspect that could be analyzed. Direct Christian references are present as well as some less obvious undertones. There is two times where we are presented with people reading from the bible. When Ford read to his slaves it was with good intentions. When Epps read to his slaves he distorted the messages in order to subjugate his slaves. Through this we can see negative consequences of people being illiterate and how people can be exploited through religion. There was also the depiction of Patsey as a Christ like figure. One final religious aspect that I would like to touch on is that no other religion was present in the movie. It’s common knowledge that Christianity was pushed on slaves to replace their pagan beliefs. The absence of their old religion speaks loudly to the subjugation that was imposed on