All Over Albany

12 Years A Slave now screening locally

The film 12 Years A Slave -- based on the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, a man from Saratoga Springs kidnapped and sold into slavery -- opens locally today. It has been getting exceptional reviews.

At Grantland, Wesley Morris explains what sets 12 Years A Slave apart, both as a film and a depiction of slavery in America:

It's a rare sugarless movie about racial inequality. [Director Steve] McQueen doesn't even give you any orchestral elevation. The score is hard and churning and sparingly used. The movie is about Northup, and at several points an audience is free to remember that most movies about the Civil War and slavery have been appeals to our higher, nobler selves. They've been appeals to white audiences by white characters talking to other white characters about the inherent injustice of oppressing black people at any moment in this planet's history. ...

The quality of these films is not the issue. A few of them are great. But after decades and decades and dozens of titles, you get the political point. Movies are the most powerful ways Hollywood has to say it's sorry. There is a kind of audacity in something like Lincoln, in which important white men get discursive about the moral quandary in which slavery mires the country. That debate required men to search their souls and vote accordingly. But after enough of these movies, you're just hot with insult. You have to stop accepting apologies, accepting, say, The Help, and start demanding correctives, films that don't glorify whiteness and pity blackness, movies -- serious ones -- that avoid leading an audience to believe that black stories are nothing without a white voice to tell them that black people can't live without the aid of white ones.

McQueen and [screenwriter John] Ridley turn that dynamic inside out. Their movie presents the privilege of whiteness, the systematic abuse of its powers, and black people's struggles to get out from beneath it. A different movie might have taken this story and turned it into a battle between Epps and the white men who feel a duty to free Northrup. That's what we're used to. There have been complaints that the movie is too violent, that it depicts too many lashings, too many cruelties, too much interracial abuse, that all the gashes on all the backs (what Toni Morrison poetically described as chokecherry trees) are just too much. But that's a privileged concern.

12 Years A Slave is being screened at the Colonie Center Regal, the Bow Tie Cinemas in Schenectady and Saratoga Springs, and the Spectrum (on two screens). Saturday morning at The Spectrum there's a "watch and discuss" screening of the film at 9 am with a panel discussion afterward, organized by the group Filling in the Gaps in American History.

Twelve Years A Slave, the memoir: Northup's original memoir is available from archive.org.

More on Solomon Northup
+ A recent WSJ article touched on the mystery of Northup's life after he regained his freedom
+ A Union College professor and a former librarian from the State Library have written a companion book about Northup, which also looks at Northup's life after regaining freedom.