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12 Years A Slave By Steve Mcqueen

850 Words4 Pages

For my movie analysis, I chose to watch 12 Years a Slave. The movie came out in 2013, just a few years ago, but the story takes place in 1841, when slavery abounded. I found this movie incredibly hard to watch. The true story about a man named Solomon Northup conveys what it really was like living back when racism was so prevalent. The film director Steve McQueen is not just telling us about an event in history, but instead captivates his audience, and forces them to see the grim reality of our nation’s past.
He tells the story of a real man, with a life and family, in a way that makes the viewers really feel for Solomon and all the slaves in this time period. He brings them to life, showing clips of Solomon Northup, a free man born and living …show more content…

The way the director uses images, staging, and dialogue in this portrayal of slavery makes it so much more than just an event or something that happened. It’s a slap in the face. The ending, although good for Northup, still leaves hundreds of slaves on a plantation in servitude, and one specific slave, a woman, watching Solomon leave, reminds us of this. Although a few slaves may have been able to escape or be saved during this time, the vast majority lived with masters, slaving over work their whole lives. The perspective that is being shown in this movie is that of the black man; from living comfortably; free, working, and happy, to being stolen away from his former life and taken into captivity. It is showing how cruel southern white men acted towards them, but I do not think it is making these white people out to be more evil than they really were. They treated these black men, women, and children terribly, and McQueen, the director, I’m sure felt that this needed to be portrayed.
What I think is interesting is that the director of the movie, Steve McQueen, is a black man who was born in London, and his screenwriter, John Ridley, is black as well. I think they felt the need to tell this story in a way that’s never been done before. Focusing in on one man’s story, and his experiences being a

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