I am sure that this will not be our last post on 12 Years a Slave. The movie is getting positive reviews, both from film critics and the historical community. Over at the Pietist Schoolman, Chris Gehrz suggests that 12 Years a Slave “seems to have surpassed the standard of being a great movie, or even being essential art, and instead become a work of history.” Here is a taste of Gerhz’s post:
We were having this debate last year because of another movie set in mid-19th century America. But while Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln received criticism from some historians for keeping African Americans largely on the sidelines of a film about the abolition of slavery, 12 Years immerses viewers in the experience of slavery itself.
The notion of the film as history is aided in part by regularly invoked contrasts to other kinds of movies about slavery that don’t achieve, or strive for, historical authenticity: “McQueen makes it impossible to regard slavery from the safe remove of TV screens (Roots), Hollywood sugarcoating (Gone With the Wind) and Tarantino satire (Django Unchained). This prickly renegade restores your faith in the harsh power of movies. You don’t just watch 12 Years a Slave. You bleed with it, share its immediacy and feel the wounds that may be beyond healing” (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone).
Indeed, some have wondered if the film isn’t too successful at evoking this particular chapter in American history. Richard Brody (in a New Yorker essay that also considers films about the Holocaust) frames the problem, “The question is whether the director Steve McQueen has trivialized or exploited Solomon Northup’s and other slaves’ sufferings by the very act of treating slavery as a collection of dramatic incidents no less ripe for naturalistic cinematic depiction than any novel or latter-day true-crime story.”
So what do you think? Should we consider 12 Years a Slave a work of history?
I first thought about this topic, John, when I screened *X* for students several years ago. As you may know, that film was based on Haley's Autobiography of Malcolm X, but it also incorporated elements from other articles. Spike Lee created something new—a new entry in the historiography. And the same goes for well-done historical films like *Amistad*, *Lincoln*, and now, apparently, *12 Years a Slave*. I think that all the best history films do some new interpretive work, even when they say “based on” some other written work. So, again, to me, the answer is yes. Films can be new works of history unto themselves. – TL
I'd love to weigh in, John. I teach a course on African-American history on film. Unfortunately, it appears that 12 Years a Slave won't open in my area, though the QCA has 3/4 a million people. This is a central problem of African-American history for Hollywood: how does one make a film that is true to the past AND secure an audience in a majority white movie-going society?
So what do you think? Should we consider 12 Years a Slave a work of history?
If it takes the place of “Roots,” that's an improvement.
Stanley Crouch:
Haley arrived on the scene when Negroes were becoming obsessed with their African ancestry and were having overwrought reactions to a tale of slavery that always, conveniently, left out the crucial role of the cooperative and profiting Africans.
Tom Sowell:
“[Roots] presented some crucially false pictures of what had actually happened—false pictures that continue to dominate thinking today.”
Etc.
Now it seems “12 Years a Slave” is getting a clean bill so far from historians. Good. Still the questions must be asked–what is being taught? For what purpose?
There is surely a point where depicting inhumanity and depravity for its own sake [think the Holocaust] defeats the educational purpose and perpetuates anger, hurts rather than heals. I hope this isn't the case with “12 Years a Slave,” but it's hardly the case that our society suffers from a lack of awareness about the inhumanity and depravity of American slavery.
To focus on our worst angels and not our better angels [such as in Amistad] presents only half our history. Most of man's history is in its inhumanity. If that's the only reason we study history, we learn little. Inhumanity is banal in its sameness.
Of the film, sfgate.com writes:
“12 Years a Slave” is anything but reticent. It is brutal, at times too brutal, and though the title of the movie lets you know the horror ultimately ends for one man, the viewer cannot for a minute think of that as a happy ending. We are simply too aware – we are made aware, and in ways that we can never forget – of the suffering that never ended, of the abuses never redressed, and of the anonymous lives that were rendered hopeless for generation upon generation.”
If “12 Years a Slave” wallows in the inhumanity, we must ask why. If we look for the worst we shall always find it. Does “12 Years” depict the norm, or does it dig for the worst, the most outrageous? Yes, there's a point in Holocaust stories where we must each say “never again,” and showing the unthinkable inhumanity is a necessary educational device.
Nearly 150 years after the end of the Civil war, is this much brutality necessary for educational purposes? Or will it just fan anger and resentment?
This, with all due respect to Tim Lacy's point above–and even more to Lendol's–is the difference between art and education. I can stipulate for the sake of cosmic argument that art has no purpose or duty beyond itself, but surely education must be bound by prudence.
For if Crouch and Haley are correct, at least two generations of students were miseducated by subjecting them to “Roots.” Movies are not reality, although our brains often treat them as such. Prudence and caution are a must.