Seeing this film for the first time, I don't think I was able to take in the magnitude of what this film has to offer. The truth in the story, a personal account written by Solomon Northup, was a real insight into the horrors of the period where slavery was as normal in the south as eating breakfast. This film is probably the first of its kind to show the experience of a slave from their point of view instead of the slave owners, which can be seen as a huge step towards realising and accepting the events that occurred before, and arguably even after, the Emancipation Proclamation.
The way the film was scripted, it doesn't shy away from the reality of Solomon's experience as it leaves in all of the violence as well as the day to day work that the slaves had to endure. This can be seen from the very start of the film, where it shows the women and men slaves having to sleep on the floor of their bunks on the plantation and overall showed how bad the conditions were for them. They had to wash and clean themselves naked together outside and had no privacy, there was no gender segregated areas to wash.
12 years also surprised me as it portrayed most of the white people as being the 'bad guys', which isn't normally seen in films staring African-Americans about slavery, which shows another leap forward in the filmmaking industry. This can be seen throughout the film in the way that the slave kidnappers and the slave owners acted as if the slaves were seen more as cattle and that they felt they had ownership of them, even if they were free like Solomon. The idea of slaves being property is most significantly portrayed in the scene where Patsy is whipped by Epps and afterwards he says that 'there is no sin where his property is involved'. This line alone portrays the mindset of most of the white people in the south; that black slaves were merely seen as profit and they felt that they could do anything with them as they owned them. This line also shows how the slave owners tried to normalise and numb themselves from the horror of slavery by blocking out the idea that the slaves had feelings or were even human. The scene where Solomon was nearly hung by one of the plantation workers after he attacked him while children played behind him and other slaves walked past without looking also shows how slavery was also, to some extent, starting to become normalised in the eyes of the slaves themselves.
The mindset of the slaves is also well portrayed and told truthfully in the film. The scene where a slave owner reclaims his slave from the kidnappers as he wants his property back is a good example. When the slave sees his master has come to reclaim him, he runs towards him and thanks him for getting him back. This shows how the slave owners tried to portray themselves as parental figures and how some slaves did see them that way, almost like Stockholm Syndrome. This idea is supported by Stanley Elkins, who argued that slavery infantilised slaves which meant they looked up the their owners like parents and obeyed them like children as they thought they didn't have the strength to fight back. This phenomenon can also be seen when the slaves are seen to be able to roam the plantations freely without supervision as it shows how the authority asserted by the slave owners through violence meant that the slaves were too scared to run away or do anything wrong as they had the fear of the beatings as well as the mindset of being captive and no chance of being free.
The violence towards the slaves was a huge factor in the film that made it a true portrayal of slavery. The extent to which the violence was shown seemed appropriate as to fully show what the film was trying to get across. The merciless beatings which Solomon had for trying to plead his case of being free when he was captured, the slave that was stabbed to death when he tried to get free when they were being transported on the boat and the countless whippings of the slaves who, most of the time, did nothing wrong although the masters thought they did. Showing these events paints a true picture of what slaves had to endure, and what they were afraid of, for the majority of their lives.
Overall, I think 12 Years a Slave is an excellently made and scripted film and it isn't afraid to tell the truth and tell the whole world about the tragedy that occurred and was overlooked for hundreds of years. This film needed to be made as the idea of such a story being told had been supressed for nearly the whole of the time film had been invented. It not only shows the violence, but it also shows the impact that slavery had on future generations of African Americans and shows some of the roots of the hatred that is felt by people to this day towards people of a different race. To conclude, 12 Years a Slave deserved all of the praise and recognition it got, and still gets, because it tells the brutal honest truth about a time that is sometimes forgotten or ignored.
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