Agnes Gitau: How did the texture of the film immerse you within its historical space?
Mike McCahill: The film’s certainly very immersive: you think of that opening shot, with the camera tracking slowly through the sugar cane, how it immediately puts you in that field at that time with those characters… The director, Steve McQueen, is particularly good at giving his images a certain *weight* — in one of his early shorts, “Deadpan”, which was part of his Turner Prize-winning show, the side of a house collapses over him, and you feel the gravity of the situation (in both senses), and the draught created as the wall tumbles down.
All his work strives to put the viewer in a certain place — to say “YOU ARE HERE”, as though pinning us to a map.
AG: How does that specifically relate to “12 Years a Slave”?
MM: In “12 Years”, perhaps the best example is the hanging sequence: other directors might have cut that into an action/peril sequence, but McQueen keeps the camera still, and leaves it running: we come to feel the weight of Solomon’s body, and of this life literally hanging in the balance.
Ayodeji Alaka: Some of it involves cliché. Take, for example, the cotton picking scenes at the height of the summer heat, where we see the sweat dripping from slaves’ foreheads. We’re left to imagine the untold number of hours they’re required to do this every day, which says something about the resilience of those who survived.
It is given emphasis when we’re shown how cotton picking ability is measured by slave owners who line up their slaves to figure out how much cotton they are capable of picking a day. And depending on the slave owner’s whim an erring slave suffers unimaginable consequences.
It makes one wonder how those who survived got the strength to do so. Solomon Northup is one example and his story is probably the tip of the iceberg.
MM: Exactly. As in his other films, “Hunger” and “Shame”, McQueen’s very big on repetition — he returns to certain scenes and set-ups time and again, to show how his characters are eaten away or ground down by the systems they find themselves within.
AG: That is interesting. How do you think this comes across in the “soap scene” when Patsey asks Solomon to kill her?
MM: The interesting thing about the soap scene is that, in real life, it was Mistress Epps who asked Solomon to kill Patsey, not Patsey herself — there’s been a bit of rewriting to make that into a moving plot point. [Fuller historical analysis can be found here].
AA: I think we may be seeing more stories in this genre, as more historically accurate accounts become available — or are released by
families with a slave holding heritage.
MM: Yes — and also as the film has performed so well, both critically and commercially. Because it’s the way Hollywood works. Even as we speak, the studios will even be looking for more stories to tell in this vein. Sounds cynical, but that’s the movie business for you!
AA: I agree.
AG: What view do you have on how this film would translate in Nairobi and Lagos to an audience who might (or might not) have informed insights into the history of America’s slave trading history and the Atlantic slave trade?
MM: Obviously, I can’t speak for African viewers, but I was struck by how the film finds several different ways into this story — it tells so
many stories in its two hours, not just Solomon’s, thus opening it up to a much wider audience.
I generally admired Spielberg’s “Amistad” — the last Hollywood attempt to tell a slavery story — but I could see there were problems in how its African protagonist remained mostly mute, meaning the white characters had to speak in his place. Here, the crucial element is that Solomon is an educated gentleman, forever trying whether by writing the letter we see at the start, or through Chiwetel Ejiofor’s ever expressive eyes to communicate all that he’s seen and experienced.
AA: From an African viewer’s perspective, I immediately see opportunities for bridging the gap between a key African characteristic, orality, as an inherent storytelling tradition accepted as fact, and story validation. This is important as stories are typically passed down and there are generally no means to validate them objectively without there being some kind of vested interest at play.
Now, at last, we have the technical tools, well-researched material open to scrutiny and education needed to sort myth from reality, so that we can begin to have honest international conversations — and it’s in this space where the studios discovering a whole new market/genre here. So here, the actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o take a look at the script, they are fascinated by Solomon Northup’s biography which Chiwetel calls an “insane odyssey”.
He feels a sense of responsibility in taking on Solomon’s character and exploring what that might mean to his descendants and the
wider issues of slavery. These actors have brought a fresh perspective to the assumptions we make about slavery, and to the task of bringing the complexities of that one life to audiences everywhere. That Chiwetel
takes responsibility for being the lead that brings an audience with African heritage into parts of a story depicting the consequences of a journey from Africa, to Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean is more the issue I think for Africans.
It possibly opens a window for people of African heritage, friends of Africa and indeed humanity into what contemporary consequences of these journey means.
MM: I wanted to raise something about the film’s depiction of slavery as a system and, more specifically, a capitalist system that still exists today. (Did you see Steve McQueen’s BAFTA acceptance speech? He was very careful to point out that slavery is an issue that needs to be addressed in the present day.) One significant consequence of the film’s immersive approach is that it never feels like Olde History while you’re watching (or, more specifically, witnessing) it, it feels as though this is going on right now, and you’re right there in the middle of it all. You the viewer become complicit in what’s happening it’s McQueen the artist, again, forcing us to confront what’s going on, rather than allowing us to distance ourselves from it, confident that all this terrible business was something that happened in the past.
AA: I see your point. We’ve been looking at the issue of slavery in terms not just of the internal turmoil, but the degree of physical,
emotional and psychological subjugation involved, and the societal indifference enhanced by the need to thrive and create wealth, to build,
innovate and revolutionise at the expense of humanity. Someone will eventually write about the relationship between the incredible
creations, inventions and obsessions the world had with the slavery agro-industrial complex and today’s labour saving devices.
Various versions of this type of agro-industrial complex still exist today. [Further information on this point can be found here]
MM: It’s an ongoing concern, yes. And what’s so brilliant about that script is that the slave-owners whether as brutal as Edwin Epps or as shrugging and relatively kindly as his predecessor are shown as complicit in different ways: one clearly relishes the power he has over others, the other is less certain what he might do with it (and therefore has to be replaced) but, crucially, neither stops to question it.
It’s not just a lesson about our ancestors’ behaviour it’s a reminder of the choices we all face, today, on an hourly basis.
We watched “12 Years A Slave” together on a beautifully rainy evening way back January at the Vue North Finchley.
Agne Gitau is Director at the Eastern African Economic Chambers of Commerce (EAECC) and runs London Africa Media Network: A media for development foundation
Mike McCahill is a film Critic at the Telegraph, The Guardian and Movie-Mail
Ayodeji Alaka is managing partner at OsanNimu
