12 Years A Slave Review

Woodrow Wilson once stated in the wake up 'Birth of a Nation' in 1915 that the film was "history written with lightening". However, in 2013 Steve McQueen's 12 Years A Slave set the record straight and thus many people have come to argue that finally, history has truly been written with lightening. Very few films have depicted slavery which is perhaps the most profoundly abiding shame in America's Hollywood. No film before 12 Years A Slave truly addressed the reality of slavery at such a personal level whereby we can truly see what life was like as a slave, not to mention the brutality and rape, but also the mental destruction that comes with it and a generation of people who are brought up in slavery and thus internalised. Numerous films in Hollywood seem to have followed the trend of black people or history being improved and saved by white people, notably, such as Taratino's Django Unchained which ultimately ends up as a revenge fantasy and doesn't really show any empathy towards the slaves or what their lives were like. Returning back to the idea of internalisation of the slaves McQueen shows this effectively by showing how their movement around the plantations is not monitored in the slightest. Clearly you can begin to understand the mindset of slaves and how their attitudes to seek freedom is bereft not only out of fear through brutality which the film shows explicitly, but also there is no possible way of returning even if on the rare chance your family wasn't also put into slavery. Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays Solomon Northup, brilliantly empitomises the loss of hope through his facial expressions and expresses the despair of slavery to an extreme extent where he joins in singing the song ('Roll, Jordan, Roll')  which all the other slaves are also singing. It is at this point where Solomon accepts he's a slave and cannot change this; something which is every slave would have to be endure in 19th century America.