As the overseers look over the slaves in disdain as they laboured in the hot scorching sun, the film “12 Years a Slave” begins with a group of black slaves working hard in the field, a time in American history considered to be inhumane, abhorrent and perhaps taboo considering the manner in which people were treated. The movie tells of the story of a freed black man sold into the crippling bondages of slavery and later emancipated after twelve long years. The movie was directed by Steve McQueen based on a true story by a man named Solomon Northup.
The protagonist of the story, Solomon Northup played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a man who was sold into slavery after being drugged and tricked into believing he would be working with a group of travelling performers. The once freed man had been shackled down and imprisoned by his open trustworthiness to strangers. He shifted from being a notable person in his area to a subhuman living only at the discretion of the master’s whip. Steve McQueen captures the hurtful truth and the brutality that was involve in the slave trade during the 19th century in the Southern states of America. The choruses of chants of the slaves in the field -as they toil the soil and picked cotton- and the sweeping landscape of Louisiana painting the grotesque picture of the life of a slave. Chris Vogner describes it as, “… a movie of paradoxical beauty, with the weeping willows and painting skies of Louisiana mocking the human torment that permeates the story.” The long shots of Ejiofor, bone deep emotions showing through his eyes, his face contorting into misery and becoming twisted from years of turmoil and battering. However, despite the predicament on Solomon Northup, the character displayed strong optimism that j...
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...made her want to kill herself as a result after she was raped by Mr. him and hit in the face with a liquor canister. His wife knowing the circumstances abuses her privilege by inflicting pain towards Patsy in any way possible because she does not have a say whether Patsy leaves or not.
The film and story and the way it is portrayed shows the agony and detrimental circumstances of a man who was deemed unworthy of being treated like a civilized human being. A time in history that displays the brutality and carnage that went on during the era of slave trade exhibited in each shot of the film is a pure execution of stating that in such a beautiful world can be something so grotesque. “12 Years a Slave, shows they attributes in an oppressive state filled with optimism as if Solomon was looking at a tiny candle at the end of a long dark tunnel.
Works Cited
Chris Vogner
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
In Solomon Northup’s memoir, Twelve Years A Slave, he depicts the lives of African Americans living in the North as extremely painful and unjust. Additionally, they faced many hardships everyday of their lives. For one, they were stripped of their identities, loved ones, and most importantly their freedom. To illustrate this, Northup says, “He denied that I was free, and with an emphatic oath, declared that I came from Georgia” (20). This quote discusses the point in which Northup was kidnapped, and how he was ultimately robbed of his freedom, as well as his identity. Furthermore, not only were his captors cruel and repulsive, so was the way in which they treated African Americans. For instance, Northup states, “…Freeman, out of patience, tore Emily from her mother by main force, the two clinging to each other with all their might” (50). In this example, a mother is being parted from her child despite her cries and supplications, the slave owner
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slavery was cruelty at its best. Slavery is described as long work days, a lack of respect for a human being, and the inability for a man or a woman to have gainful employment. The slaves were victimized the most for obvious reasons. Next on the list would be the families of both the slave and slave owners. At the bottom of the list would be the slave owners. Slavery does in fact victimize slaves, slave owner and their families by repeating the same cycle every generation.
The movie 12 Years a Slave, is an exceptional film. It shows how brutal and inhumane American Slavery is. The movie itself is shockingly truthful as to the events that actually happened. There were many scenes that made it hard to not look away from the screen. Along with numerous scenes of trying to hold back tears. This movie is filled with heartache, sorrow, pure utter violence, but also love. There were many amazing actors and actress’ in this movie. Altogether, this film was brilliant. In fact, it has won many awards. Including, an Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress, Best Writing Adapted Screenplay, and many more outstanding awards. This movie is brutally honest, but well deserved. A free-man was
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:
Imagine. You are alone with your thoughts. There is nothing that can separate you from their unpredictable horrors because you spend 23 hours a day completely alone. In silence you wait, desperate for a chance to leave the four-walled, concrete cell you now call home. These are the conditions of solitary confinement that are still in widespread use throughout America today. Although solitary confinement may seem like the safest way to protect other prisoners, guards and even the inmate himself, it is an inhumane and cruel punishment and it has the opposite effect of what prisons are intended for. .
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
Slavery takes its part in history by containing the darkest, most cruel centuries of our nation. Often times, people are simply exposed to the surface of a very complex time period. Slavery in the United States has very intricate facets to it. In the outstanding film 12 Years a Slave, the life of a slave is captured through Solomon Northup's eyes. Although he was a free man, Northup was kidnapped and wrongly sold into slavery.
It features powerful and moving performances, and characters with a depth and realism so often lacking in period dramas. McQueen’s film stays true to the real Solomon Northup’s account and the historical era that account is based in, while also challenging racial stereotypes, and including elements of black resistance to oppression and diversity within the African American population. “12 Years a Slave” is to American slavery, what Spindler’s List was to the Holocaust. This film is a must see for American audience of all ethnic backgrounds, for it provides a heart-wrenching look into a less talked about period of our
Viewing 12 Years A Slave for the first time was excruciating. The director of the film depicts a vivid view of the horror that African Americans endured during the slavery era. He illustrates one man's journey, Solomon Northup, starting out as a free man, being captured, becoming property, to finally being able to see his family in this same lifetime. The writer's objective for the viewer was to create a timeline of events that could happen to one through this horrific stage. By glimpsed into one person’s life of bondage as a viewer, you can truly empathize with the main character as well as others who endured enslavement.
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.
Slavery was an exceedingly common practice in American society throughout the Nineteenth century. Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist and former slave, writes of the dehumanization and cruelty toward slaves in his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. As a slave, Douglass endured intolerable levels of cruelty from his slaveholders, as well as white society as a whole. (one more sentence?). Douglass utilizes simile, anaphora, irony, juxtaposition and antithesis to present his hardships and experiences as a slave to clarify how the system of slavery has corrupted slaves, slaveholders, and Christianity.
“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