Rarely is American “civilisation” glimpsed from the vantage of its gruesome underside. In 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen channels his superb directorial energies toward the much-neglected holocaust of the 19thcentury: and those luxurious Louisiana plantation-estates, adoringly incarnated in American period cinema, become unimaginable without the torments of the black slaves who sustained them. Brutality and indignity lay adjacent to wealth and splendour; history and its dread consequence come surging into the present.
Through drifts of melancholy and terror, 12 Yearsgives a visual intensity to Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir of the same name. A freeborn African-American of Saratoga Springs, New York, Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) enjoys a gracious domestic life – an accomplished musician and father of two doted-upon daughters. But on a fateful evening, he is seduced by the well-paying proposal of two white gentlemen, whose bitter deceit finds him drugged-up and enchained the following morning, sold into the murk of slavery. In scenes which recall the clinical brutality of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Northup is shipped to the south among the other captured, beaten in rituals of intimate sadism, and given the identity of “Platt”, a runaway slave from Georgia. His merchant assures a prospective customer, “My sentimentality extends to the length of coin”.
From here, bereft of his “free papers”, Northup is forced to relinquish his identity and is subjected to two masters: first the sympathetic hypocrisies of William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), and then the savage, drunken mania of Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender). The film moves with physical, sensual presence – the violent crunch of fiddle-strings being tightly wound prefigure the percussive contact of whips exacting flesh from black bodies; tension builds from the plangent roar of cello, and scenes of gorgeous southern languor give way to spectacles of humiliation. At one of its climactic moments, Northup dangles half-hanging from a tree-branch, his feet scraping the muddied ground and throat hoarsely gasping, while all around him, the day’s labour continues. Here, McQueen does not spare us the horrific everyday life of the enslaved. And equally, 12 Years wards off the masculine-heroic absurdities of Django Unchained, giving a terrible, moral weight to its violence.
Northup learns of the grim accommodations which must be made to merely survive in this world. Though his story is one of a fraught redemption – the length of capture assured by the film’s title – the tone is aggrieved with mortal, emotional and epistemic pain. It’s difficult to watch, hearing the suicidal whispers of fellow slave Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), seeing the masterful expressions of Ejiofor, whose face concentrates the swoop from disbelief to morbid resignation. Or knowing of the unrescued thousands. McQueen builds a felt critique of slavery from the ground up. That system of perversity emerges in the psychodynamics of the master-slave relationship, the minor struggles and the obliterated hopes. 12 Years is painful, beautiful; a much-needed rush of repressed memories into the public consciousness. This is enriching, socially-conscious and essential cinema.