Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave – part-art film, part-blockbuster – has attracted wild acclaim. This has, unsurprisingly, focussed on McQueen’s unflinching exposition of slavery. The feel and cadence of the Black Belt seems spookily precise; Chiwetel Ejiofor recently admitted that being on set felt like ‘walking with ghosts’. Central to McQueen’s achievement is the film’s veracity, but many critics have asked how 12 Years will influence our understanding of slavery. It is presently far too early to tell, but there can be no doubt that this film will greatly impact on how remember ol’ Dixie.
McQueen displayed real intelligence in choosing to bring Solomon Northup’s story to the screen. He has laboured the Anne Frank comparison a little in the public eye, but for good reason. There is much contained in the story of Northup’s capture and enslavement that reminded me of Holocaust cinema. It might seem reductive to argue that this film, vaunted for its depiction of such a distinct time and place, is somehow typical of another, equally controversial genre. Yet there are undeniable similarities toSchlinder’s List and The Pianist, which have embedded the Holocaust in Western memories.
There is the way McQueen presents slavery’s inhumanity. With minimalist camerawork, the director of Shame and Hunger shows us sadism with artful juxtaposition. Serene tableaux of rural Louisiana are invaded by pastiches of unfreedom. Black matriarchs sort through cotton, as the younger men are lashed in the background for not picking enough. In another scene, a botched lynching leaves Solomon half-dead, suspended from a branch framing the agrarian idyll behind him.
McQueen uses the tranquil backdrop of the American South to highlight slavery’s brutal aberration. But directors bringing the Holocaust to the screen have also used this technique. Roman Polanski focussed on Warsaw’s urbanity when charting ghettoization in The Pianist. A prosperous Jewish family become impoverished, brutalised and separated by German occupation. This process takes place in the foreground of Warsaw’s baroque cityscape. ‘The Girl in the Red Dress’, Spielberg’s iconic set piece in Schindler’s List, is given added pathos by Krakow’s elegant setting. This technique hammers home the inhuman, and McQueen uses it with haunting effect in 12 Years as Slave.
McQueen shows us slavery and authority in a way that is customary to the Holocaust genre. There are considerable comparisons to be made between Fassbender’s ‘nigger-breaker’ Edwin Epps, and Ralph Fiennes’ performance as Commandant Amon Goethe in Schindler’s List. Epps stumbles across his plantation charged by drunken paranoia, and his obsession with slave-girl Patsy – ‘Queen o’ the Fields, an’ God gi’ ‘er to-me’ – parallels Goethe’s lusting after a Jewish untermensch.
Epps’s luring after Patsy riles his malicious wife. Mary cuckolds Edwin in front of the other slaves until Patsy herself becomes the subject of his ‘nigger-breaking’, in a public redemption of authority. Goethe’s wanton killing of camp inmates, on the other hand, forms a macho display to impress his subordinates. Epps and Goethe are in similar scenarios, just different places. Both commit violence to shore up their authority, in a racial hierarchy where domination simultaneously enables and prohibits their sexual peccadilloes.
Perhaps the most legitimate point of comparison between 12 Years a Slave and the Holocaust genre is Solomon Northup’s story. A Freedman kidnapped in New York and sold as a slave in Louisiana; this broadly follows the trajectory of inmates we see inSchindler’s List. Prospering, urbane people who are dehumanised by their infernal captivity. McQueen chose Solomon’s story because it presented slavery in these terms, to Western audiences acquainted with the artistic pathos of Holocaust cinema.
We watch Solomon, an accomplished violinist, become the muted slave ‘Platt’. His enjoyment of writing and playing dissipates, as they come to threaten his survival among illiterate peers. Solomon’s first owner, Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), warns him that ‘you are an exceptional nigger, but I fear no good will come of it’. Epps threatens him for playing the violin at a local judge’s home, accusing him of ‘charming with your slick nigger ways’. The violin that lays smashed at Northup’s feet by the end of the film is symbolic of his transition into the persona of a southern slave.
The vast majority of slaves were born and died illiterate on plantations in the South. Solomon’s kidnapping is a rare example that paints slavery as a dehumanising institution. This contains a pathos that is shared with The Pianist. Adrien Brody’s character, a Polish musician, survives the clearing of the Warsaw Ghetto at the cost of his own serenity. He becomes a brutalised husk of the man he was, in much the same way that, by the end of 12 Years, Ejiofor’s character looks physically worsted by his experiences. It is a distressing, but illuminating way of presenting slavery’s human impact.
There can be absolutely no doubt about the realism of McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, which has propelled it to assured Oscar success. But before considering the big question of how the film will affect the way we remember slavery, it is important to recognise the influence of Holocaust cinema tradition. 12 Years a Slave is an artful look at a brutal part of American history, and is likely to become an iconic point of reference for slavery, just like Schindler’s List is for the Holocaust. But when ‘walking with ghosts’ in war-torn Europe or the Antebellum South, it would seem that directors and audiences look for the same things.
