Who Is Steve Mcqueen's Film 12 Years A Slave?

Steve McQueen’s film 12 Years a Slave (2013) is one of very few films attempting to portray, with utmost fidelity, the concept scholars refer to as slavery. The film represents 3a true story and is based on the 1853 memoir of former slave Solomon Northup. To bring Northup to life, McQueen hired Professor Henry Louis Gates, an historical consultant from Harvard. The film received world recognition and won an Oscar Award in 2014. Unlike many other slave narratives, this narrative originates directly from a real enslaved person, and one who experienced slavery after a living as a free man. As Northup states openly in his memoir, “I can speak of Slavery only so far as it came under my own observation—only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person” (Northup 5). The film begins with Northup depicted as a prosperous free man living with his wife Anne Hampton and three children in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. In 1941, Northup was kidnapped and shipped to New Orleans to be sold first to William Prince Ford, a plantation owner. Although Northup is smart and appreciated by his master, he was transferred after a quarrel to Epps, an alcoholic abuser. Northup’s liberation from slavery comes when a Canadian carpenter who works at the plantation helps Northup

It revives the idea of nineteenth century abolitionism and leaves us wondering about the plausibility of employing the history of racial slavery to understand our contemporary racial struggle. Some contemporary critics dismissed the film as irrelevant to our contemporary predicament or as a show of “torture porn” (White). Nevertheless, the film expresses the horror of slavery as seen through the eyes of the protagonist who was born free and kidnapped to be sold later as a slave. Northup notes that his story “is truly and faithfully delineated in these [Northup’s memoir] pages. There is no fiction, no exaggeration” (Northup