The historical background of the American film "Twelve Years as a Slave" (2013) is based on the rampant period of black slave smuggling in the 40s and 50s of the 19th century, which is adapted from the biographical novel "Twelve Years of Black Slaves" (1853) written by black Solomon Northup.
Steve McQueen follows the realistic style and uses a bland linear narrative to show the tragedy of the life of the protagonist Solomon from a free black man to a black slave. From the perspective of subject matter, this is a film about racial discrimination, and the black Solomon struggled for personal freedom and dignity for 12 years.
Director McQueen used his shooting style that has always focused on the protagonist himself, limiting the film to Solomon's personal sights and hears, forming a typical small-pattern narrative style. The film does not intend to portray the grand historical events that occurred when the phenomenon of slavery in the United States was serious, but only focused on the real life details of black slaves, showing the fate of individuals in a specific context in the details. While the audience lamented Solomon's personal fate, it also witnessed a condensed history of black slave blood and tears.
Therefore, after the official release of the film in the United States on November 8, 2013, it quickly became a famous film that stated the issue of slavery and racial discrimination in a realistic style, and won many awards. From the perspective of narrative style, small-pattern narrative and condensed history have become prominent features of this film.
Director McQueen's intention in filming "Twelve Years as a Slave" is to restore a cruel, bloody and real history, and the hero Solomon, as the witness of the event, has become the only intuitive and implicit narrator of the story.
There are certain risks in adopting this traditional and bland narrative style in the film, such as: the history of the slave trade is more than 400 years, and the 12 years experienced by Solomon are only a short moment in it, how can these 12 years successfully reproduce more than 400 years of black slave history? To this end, director McQueen must have put a lot of effort into familiarizing himself with the history of black slaves in the United States, because it is in his carefully designed film language.
The audience saw his perfect condensation of the history of the development of black slaves. If the audience carefully looks at every bridge in the film and savors every detail in the film, it will be strung together into a history from the slave trade to the reclamation of the southern United States to the rescue of black slaves.
For example, the group portrait of black slaves standing in the field at the beginning of the movie is a picture with a strong sense of the times, which quickly transports the audience to the black slave plantations in the United States in the 19th century. In the plot design of Solomon's enslavement, the director strongly emphasizes the plot of Solomon's abduction.
Judging from the details of the traffickers in the film hiding Solomon under the carriage for late-night transportation, and not auctioning black slaves in the market, but setting the auction place in the seller's living room, this is obviously an operation of smuggling black slaves, which shows the historical background that the open slave trade has been prohibited by law and illegal slave smuggling is very rampant, which is consistent with the historical facts of black slave traffickers in the 40s of the 19th century, who did not hesitate to attack prisons, abduct children, kidnap women, and lure drunks in order to obtain black slaves.
Smugglers frantically kidnap free blacks or black slaves who already have masters in order to obtain "black gold", as the details of the black slave Clemens being forcibly taken back from the ship by his master using a legal paragraph at the beginning of this film is to illustrate the extent to which slave smuggling was rampant at that time.
As for the labor intensity of black slaves, it is also recorded in the history books: "After changing to sugar cane, the labor intensity of black slaves also increased. Normally, as soon as dawn broke, black slaves were driven to the farm. Except for half an hour for breakfast and a temporary departure from the sugar cane fields for the hottest two hours at noon, the rest of the time was spent working on the farm.
Those two hours are often diverted to lighter chores. During the harvest season, slaves worked the longest and most intensively, sometimes 18 hours, 12 hours in the boiler room of the sugar factory, plus five or six hours to cut down the sugar cane. ”
In order to show the labor intensity of black slaves in the plantation, the film specially arranged a black slave cotton picking competition, in order to complete the daily picking amount of 200 pounds stipulated by the master, the sick black Abram died on the spot in the cotton field.
The film, as Western scholars have commented on Northup's Twelve Years of Black Slaves, is "not just a personal adventure, but a keen observation of the slavery environment in the South." In addition to the above, "Twelve Years as a Slave" also deals with the hatred between black slaves and white overseers, the family and love of black slaves, the religious beliefs of black slaves, the relationship between black slaves and local indigenous people, and the survival wisdom of black slaves.
