12 years a slave streaming vf
12Years a Slave est un film réalisé par Steve McQueen (II) avec Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender. Synopsis : Les États-Unis, quelques années avant la guerre de Sécession.12 Years a Slave The Team 2014 - 🎬 Regarde Maintenant 📥 Télécharger12 Years a Slave The Team 2014 Film Streaming Gratuit en Français, Regarder[Vostfr] 12 Years a Slave The Team 2014 en Streaming VF CinémaTitre original 12 Years a Slave The TeamSortie 2014-03-04Durée * minutesScore 0 de 0 utilisateursGenre Documentary, DramaEtoiles Steve McQueen, Dede Gardner, Aaron P. Mastin, Rob Steinberg, Adam Stockhausen, Jeremy Kleiner, Ma Kalaadevi AnandaLangue originale EnglishMots-clés [Regarder VF En Ligne] 12 Years a Slave The Team 2014 Film Complet Telecharger HD 12 Years a Slave The Team Film Complet en streaming VF ~ 12 Years a Slave The Team , Regarder 12 Years a Slave The Team en streaming , film streaming vf , Steve McQueen , Dede Gardner , Aaron P Mastin , Rob Steinberg , Adam Stockhausen , Jeremy Kleiner , Ma Kalaadevi Ananda , Sean Bobbitt , Bill Pohlad , Chiwetel Ejiofor ,Voir film 12 Years a Slave en streaming ~ Première dans son genre Drame la film 12 Years a Slave vf traite divers sujets de la société On voit apparaître les acteurs qui maîtrisent leurs rôles parfaitement Cette film 12 Years a Slave originale est une pépite des films TV Disponible sur notre Le top Serie Streaming Film en streaming sur topseriestreaming en streaming fr et en bonne qualité et en full HD Vous pouvez la regarder en entier, gratuitement sans limite de temps, sans coupure et sans inscriptionRegarder 12 Years a Slave en streaming HD, Complet, et VF ~ Film Streaming HD 12 Years a Slave vf gratuit, streaming complet VF 2013, Les ÉtatsUnis, quelques années avant la guerre de Sécession Solomon Northup, jeune homme noir originaire de lÉtat de New York, est enlevé et vendu comme esclave Face à la cruauté dun propriétaire de plantation de coton, Solomon se bat pour rester en vie et garder sa dignitéStreaming 12 Years A Slave Film Complet VF ~ Streaming 12 Years A Slave Streaming Complet Film VF HD 1080p en Français, Streaming 12 Years A Slave Streaming Film Complet en Français Regardez tout le film sans limitation, diffusez en streaming en qualité optimale12 Years A Slave Streaming Vf Film Complet VF ~ 12 Years A Slave Streaming Vf Streaming Complet Film VF HD 1080p en Français, 12 Years A Slave Streaming Vf Streaming Film Complet en Français Regardez tout le film sans limitation, diffusez en streaming en qualité optimale12 Years a Slave en MP3MP4 Jmef ~ 12 Years a Slave film réalisée par Steve McQueen Les ÉtatsUnis, quelques années avant la guerre de Sécession Solomon Northup, jeune homme noir originaire de lÉtat de New York, est enlevé et vendu comme esclave Face à la cruauté dun propriétaire de plantation de coton, Salomon se bat pour rester en vie et garder sa dignité Douze ans plus tard, il va croiser un Films 12 Years A Slave Complet En Streaming Complet Vostfr ~ 12 Years a Slave ON 076SE Streaming Français Film Complet En Français, 12 Years a Slave streaming complet gratuitement 2013 Les ÉtatsUnis, quelques a12 Years a Slave film 2013 AlloCiné ~ 12 Years a Slave est un film réalisé par Steve McQueen II avec Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender Synopsis Les ÉtatsUnis, quelques années avant la guerre de Sécession Solomon Northup 12 Years a Slave film Wikipedia ~ 12 Years a Slave is a 2013 biographical perioddrama film and an adaptation of the 1853 slave memoir Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, a New York Stateborn free AfricanAmerican man who was kidnapped in Washington, DC by two conmen in 1841 and sold into slaveryNorthup was put to work on plantations in the state of Louisiana for 12 years before being releasedArchives des Films Regarder Films ~ Regarderfilms 32232 Films francais HD gratuits en streaming Les marques, noms commerciaux et logos figurant sur ce site sont des marques déposées par leur propriétaire respectif12 Years A Slave Film Streaming so8eeShaeth ~ 12 Years A Slave Film Streaming Posted by nellbrothersonv3 0 Les ÉtatsUnis, quelques années avant la guerre de Sécession Solomon Northup, jeune homme noir originaire de lÉtat de New York, est enlevé et vendu comme esclave Face à la cruauté dun propriétaire de plantation de coton, Solomon se bat pour rester en vie et garder sa dignité Douze ans plus tard, il va croiser un 12 Years A Slave streaming Film Streaming vf ~ Voir 12 Years A Slave en streaming vf enligne gratuit film en streaming Research and publish the best content Get Started for FREE Sign up with Facebook Sign up with Twitter I dont have a Facebook or a Twitter account Already have an account Login Try Business Plans Resources Join Free Research and publish the best content film en streaming 334 views 0 today Follow No tag on any 12 years a slave Bande annonce VF ~ 12 Years a Slave Sortie le 22 janvier 2014 Un film de Steve McQueen Avec Chiwetel Ejiofor, Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender Pour plus dinformations, de vidéos ou de bande annonce sur 12 Years a Oscars 2014 12 Years a Slave meilleur film, 7 prix pour ~ Malgré ses 7 trophées dont ceux du Meilleur Réalisateur, de la Meilleure Photo et de la Meilleure Musique, Gravity a vu lOscar du Meilleur Film revenir à 12 Years a Slave, tandis que Twelve Years a Slave Wikipédia ~ Twelve Years a Slave typographié 12 Years a Slave, ou Esclave pendant douze ans au Québec, est un drame historique britannicoaméricain produit et réalisé par Steve McQueen, sorti en 2013 Il sagit de ladaptation de lautobiographie Douze ans desclavage de Solomon Northup il est interprété par Chiwetel Ejiofor, accompagné par Michael Fassbender et Lupita Nyongo dans des Howto watch online, stream, rent or buy 12 Years a Slave in New Zealand + release dates, reviews and trailers. 2014 Golden Globe (Best Film, Drama) and Academy Award (Best Picture) winner, based on the true story of free black man Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who was taken from his home in upstate New York and sold into slavery.
Variously described as “blistering and brilliant”, and “a new, movie landmark of cruelty and transcendence", 12 Years A Slave looks set to storm the headlines and, in all probability, the 2014 awards season when it goes on general release. The $20m feature film, directed by Steve McQueen, written by John Ridley, with Sean Bobbitt BSC the cinematographer, is adapted from the 1853 autobiography Twelve Years A Slave by Solomon Northup. Northup, a free black man, was kidnapped in Washington DC in 1841 and sold into slavery. He then worked on plantations in the state of Louisiana for 12 years before his eventual release. The cast includes Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup, Michael Fassbender as Edwin Epps, a cruel plantation owner, Benedict Cumberbatch as William Ford, a Baptist preacher and slave owner, Paul Giamatti as slave trader Theophilus Freeman, Lupita Nyong'o as Patsey, a slave on the Epps plantation, and Brad Pitt as Samuel Bass, a Canadian carpenter. The seven-week shoot began in New Orleans, Louisiana in June 2012 concluding mid-August. During its limited release at film festivals, the movie has already been lauded by critics and audiences, with praise for its acting, Steve McQueen's direction, screenplay, Bobbitt’s cinematography, production values, and its extreme faithfulness to Solomon Northup's eponymous autobiography. Here Bobbitt talks about his cinematographic work on a movie about a life that gets taken away, but which ultimately lets us touch what life really is. How did you come to get involved with 12 Years A Slave? I’ve been working with Steve McQueen for the best part of 12 years – firstly on his art installations, and then I shot Hunger 2008 and Shame 2011 with him. We’ve become great friends and see each other regularly, even though he lives in Amsterdam and I live in London. He’s such a fascinating character. A kernel of an idea will appear, we discuss it, and then it may go away for quite a while before it comes back again fully-formed. But 12 Years A Slave was quite different, it didn’t have a long gestation. Steve’s wife found Solomon Northup’s book, he was hugely interested in making a film about slavery, and it was all very fast from there. Steve was talking about it before we started making Shame. We started on 12 Years A Slave as soon as Shame was released in 2012. What appealed to you about 12 Years A Slave? Slavery is an issue that has been forgotten, and most of the films that have been made about it have been watered down, to say the least. So it was time for something like 12 Years A Slave. But my interest was also in continuing to work with Steve. Every cinematographer is looking for a brave, original, respectful and loyal director. And when you find that person, you want to stay with them. It was a no-brainer for me when Steve mentioned 12 Years A Slave. The epic scale of the film, the visual possibilities, complexities and challenges were very exciting. Did you read the original book Twelve Years A Slave? I try not to read books that scripts are based on, for the simple reason that my loyalty, intellectually and spiritually, is to the script and not the book. If I had read the book, I would identify with elements in the book, and would probably come into conflict with those. The template I prefer to work from is the screenplay, to understand the desires of the director, and not have anything else in my head. For me, that’s the starting point from which cinematography should grow. When you first discussed the look of 12 Years A Slave with Steve McQueen, how did you envisage the film? We nailed-down the look early-on. Although 12 Years A Slave is based on a true story, we were making a work of fiction. We wanted to stay away from a grungy documentary style – no frippery, nothing to distract the audience from being completely engaged in the story. Our two watchwords were “simple” and “painterly”, and we held on to those throughout the production. What research did you do? What creative references did you look at? Every director is different and every project is different. The great advantage of having worked with Steve on so many productions over the years is that we share an understanding. We can leap in quickly to the depth of the story. Steve is very good at presenting references that are relevant – paintings, photos, films, installations. He had a really broad selection for 12 Years A Slave, although nothing specific about slavery – from bizarre and little-known Korean films, to a PBS documentary series about the roots of jazz, as well as contemporary American artists like Cara Walker. Her work uses silhouettes, touches on slavery and sexuality, and is quite anarchic and very in-your-face. These we all very interesting references for me. We had a truly fantastic art department, lead by Adam Stockhausen, who did an awful lot of research. They came up with early photographs from that period – of slaves, slave shacks, plantations and New Orleans – that were truly remarkable as visual references. We got a concrete idea of how people dressed and how they lived, and this sparked the look and feel of the film. It was really helpful to have that visual verisimilitude and to bring that to the screen. "Every cinematographer is looking for a brave, original, respectful and loyal director. And when you find that person, you want to stay with them." - Sean Bobbitt BSC Tell us your reasoning behind your choice of equipment? What aspect ratio did you select? Because of the epic nature of the story, and what we wanted to produce, we knew from day-one that we wanted to shoot on film. Digital never entered our thinking. It followed that would be right aspect ratio to give us that epic sense of scale, and sheer production value. As a further consideration, the environments we’d be working in were harsh, with temperatures into the early 40C and truly biblical thunderstorms, and I knew film cameras would hold up. What kit did you choose? We shot using ARRI LT and ST cameras in 4-perf, hired from ARRI CSC in NY. I have used these a lot and trust them implicitly. The LT is nicely balanced for handheld work, and is really rugged and reliable. The ST is pretty much bulletproof. I used a full set of Cooke S4 primes, from 14 to 150mm. I like the look of them, and knew they would lend themselves to this production. The S4s have a forgiving softness, compared to other primes, but when projected they have equal if not better resolution, and a nice warmth. I also used an Angenieux Optimo 24-290 zoom. Lights were supplied through gaffer Michael McLaughlin. The grip equipment was supplied by key grip Nick Leon through Orange Whip Grips. Dollies, cranes and remote heads came from Chapman Leonard Studio Equipment. Which film stocks did you select? I chose to shoot the daylight exteriors using Kodak Vision3 50 Daylight 5203, and some daylight interiors with Kodak Vision3 250 Daylight 5207. They are both astounding, clean stocks with fantastic colour. For nighttime and candle-lit scenes I used Kodak Vision3 500 Tungsten 5219, pushed one stop to 1,000 ASA. I’d quite often supplement the candlelight with a combination of simple chinaballs, 40W light bulbs and photofloods dimmed right down to match the colour temperature of the candles themselves. I have to say that the latitude of modern film stocks, combined with what you can do in the DI, means that the challenge of shooting dark and light skin in the same frame is much easier these days. How much time did you have for prep/pre-production? What was the working schedule? I had five weeks of prep, and those five weeks go fast. The first two weeks are the most important, as that’s the time when you have full access to the director, when ideas are discussed and refined. After that the demands on the director mean your access becomes less and less, and your own workload is increasing too. We shot five day weeks mainly, standard 12–hour days, and didn’t go over very often. We rarely do on Steve’s films. He’s very decisive on-set, and we tend to shoot fairly sparsely. Many Hollywood productions tend to shoot a lot of coverage, and that means long hours. But we shot just what we needed. Where did you shoot? I’d say 95% of the film was shot on location, in working plantations, in the countryside around New Orleans. We did most of the recce’s during the first two weeks of prep, became highly-aware of the visual possibilities the locations offered, and that sparked a lot of creative discussion. Some of the locations were quite haunting. There is one scene in which Solomon makes a break for freedom, only come across a couple of black slaves being hung from a tree. I found a tree for this scene, and quickly learnt from the present owner of the plantation that slaves had actually been hung from it in the past. Their overgrown graves were still there beside it. We used that same tree for the scene in the movie. Knowing what happened there gives you, the crew and the actors, an extra-heightened sense of what you are doing. Who were your crew? Do you have any thoughts to share about them? Louisiana offers fantastic tax breaks, and New Orleans has a vibrant filmmaking community, with great equipment and very good technicians – “crews of character” – who I found unique and refreshing. The most important person to me is the first AC, and I was able to bring in Brett Walters. I was fortunate to get Michael McLaughlin as my gaffer, and his team, plus Nick Leon as my key grip, and his team of grips. They are all very experienced and hardworking, and maintained great patience and humour despite the trying conditions. We had two fantastic Steadicam operators. Andy Shuttleworth, an old mate from England who I used to assist in the 1980s, shot the dancing sequences, and the legendary Larry McConkey filmed the one with Paul Giamatti and Solomon at the slave market. How about your work with other heads of department? I cannot praise the production design work of Adam Stockhausen highly enough for its simplicity and authenticity. You can only film what is in front of you, and if it’s absolutely spot-on, no matter where you point the camera, it’s going to work. We were also fortunate to have costume designer Patricia Norris, who is a legendary character. She added so much value to the look of the film through the costumes she designed and found. As every cinematographer knows, great audio enhances your images dramatically. The film has a fantastic soundtrack courtesy of the genius of sound recordist Kirk Francis and his team, with a score from the amazing Hans Zimmer. What was your approach to the camera movement? The idea was not to limit the camera movement, but to make sure the moves were relevant. The guidance was simplicity. We shot mainly with the camera on the dolly, apart from some specific crane, handheld and Steadicam scenes. Tell us about any sequences that you are particularly proud of from a cinematographic POV? There are two dancing sequences when Solomon is playing the fiddle – as a freeman and as a slave – and we wanted to visually join those in the edit. So we shot both of these using the great Steadicam talents of Andy Shuttleworth. In a sequence at the slave market, we wanted to find a way to highlight the ritualised absurdity and sheer inhumanity of the selling of slaves. Working with Larry McConkey, we carefully choreographed a continuous Steadicam shot around Paul Giamatti and Chiwetel, as Solomon is being sold for the first time. The shot lasts around three minutes, and really heightens the horror of what’s going on. There is one even longer sequence that I operated on handheld – over eight minutes of continuous filming – for the horrific climax of the film in which Solomon is forced at gunpoint to whip another slave. When I read the script I knew this scene needed to be one uninterrupted shot roaming around the action, and Steve agreed. The effect of the continuous shot in relation to violence is very powerful. If you don’t introduce an edit, the audience does not have an escape and you are forced to watch the images in front of you, heightening the effect of the drama. I also got to use an amazing bit of kit – the 73’ Chapman Hydrascope telescoping crane arm – on an introductory shot of Solomon and his family walking through Saratoga, NY. The camera moves in a way you’re not expecting, but you would not know the camera was on a crane, and I think it works successfully. Who handled the dailies? Although we were shooting on celluloid, you don’t get to see film dailies these days. But we were fortunate to work with Bradley Greer, a gem of a colourist, at Cineworks, a bijou film lab in New Orleans. They took fantastic care over the rushes processing and produced wonderful full-res QT dailies for me, so I had a fairly accurate representation on my calibrated laptop. Where did you do the DI, and what has it contributed to the movie? The DI was started at CO3 in NY, with Tom Poole, with whom I did A Place Beyond The Pines. I think he is the best colourist in the US right now. We did a week together in NY, and we then both moved to CO3 in LA to link up with Steve, who had been working on the sound mix, for a second week. The DI is now such an important element of a production. It’s where things come home to roost for the DP as you fine-tune the imagery, and very important to have the right person to help you. Obviously the story takes place over a 12-year period, and Solomon changes imperceptibly during that time. Creating that as a dramatic element came through very careful hair and make-up during the production, but also through a meticulous approach to the DI. How did 12 Years A Slave challenge you/push your skills? It’s an epic, period drama about a purely horrible part of history. I think the main challenge for me was to capture the epic scale of the story without losing the intimate and personal point-of-view of Solomon Northrup, whilst maintaining a visual continuity throughout the film – so that it is coherent and compelling from start to finish. But it wasn’t just my challenge. Filmmaking is a team effort, and working with the director, other heads of department, the crew and actors, we have hopefully pulled it off.
Disce que tu penses sur twelve years a slave streaming vf pour que les autres utilisateurs connaissent ton opinion et puissent avoir plus d'infos tout en partant de ton évaluation. Te voilà 1During the Obama years, the issue of race seemed to dissolve into the so-called “post-racial” era in the media. For critics such as H. Roy Kaplan in The Myth of Post-Racial America Searching for Equality in the Age of Materialism 2011 and David J. Leonard and Lisa A. Guerrero in African Americans on Television Race-ing for Ratings 2013, however, such colorblindness led to the bypassing of any direct confrontation with the persistent problems linked to race in contemporary American society. 2In his critically acclaimed 2013 cinematic release 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen circumvents the “great white narrative” by addressing race “head-on” instead of metaphorically, writing every character within their own racial background. As in Solomon Northup’s 1853 Twelve Years a Slave, black characters are not removed from their own histories; instead, they are shaped and defined by them. To what extent, then, does the film distinctly voice racial concerns and tensions and provide representational spaces on screen in a nuanced and reflective manner? How does it—if indeed it does—subvert the characteristic black slave/character and white master/hero dynamic and embrace a wide variety of black stories and perspectives? By reconsidering the classic biopic/historical film, I will examine how the movie relocates America’s problems with race at the very heart of the national debate and offers a “post-post-racial” screen model that directly confronts race history. 3In The Black Image in the White Mind Media and Race in America, Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki suggest there is a new goal or end for media operations in the realm of race encouraging audiences and media producers alike to become more critically self-aware as they deal with the culture’s racial signals. Such activity would serve not only the social interest in racial comity, but the media’s long-term economic interests as well. And it would set the stage for an eventual cessation—an end in the other sense—to color consciousness, for arrival at the time, however far off, when “race” no longer holds meaning for media producers and their audiences. Building on Benedict Anderson’s work on “imagined communities,” they insist that “[t]oday, the same processes operate common identification is shaped by mediated images of who constitutes one’s own people and nation” Entman and Rojecki 205. 4To what extent does 12 Years a Slave rebuild and extend this imagined community by inscribing the experience of slavery on screen? Does McQueen’s treatment of the historical movie/biopic change the way in which the race factor has been addressed so far in American cinema and is it a socially subversive intervention? One hundred years of silence 1 On Django Unchained, see Paquet-Deyris, 2016. 5At the time 12 Years a Slave was released, quite a few critical voices had already emphasized the impossibility of squaring “post-racialism” with contemporary material realities in the United States. The main comments had to do with the misrepresentation of the black experience on screen—including in movies where the lead actors were black—and with the lingering stereotypical treatment of racialized bodies. Even some movies and TV shows like Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 Django Unchained or Veena Sud’s 2018 Seven Seconds and Dan Fogelman’s 2016 This Is Us, reputed for championing a representational space for black bodies, critics claimed, were structured around a white male narrative arc to further the 6In 1984, American photographer and director Gordon Parks had already fictionalized Solomon Northup’s narrative of enslavement, adapting it for television under the title Solomon Northup’s Odyssey. But his protagonist interpreted by Avery Brooks very much fell into the “hypermasculine categor[y] of the Heroic Slave’ as famously invented by Frederick Douglass” Tillet 360. His representation of Northup bordered on the exceptional. By figuring the past, Parks felt compelled to construct an idealized heroic figure, thus bypassing the rules and conventions of the biopic. If we consider that the biopic’s fundamental tenets are to “[depict] the life of a historical person, past or present” Custen 5 and provide a certain degree of realism, objectivity, and verifiability, then this earlier adaptation of Twelve Years a Slave is by no means a classic biopic. Neither is 12 Years a Slave. Northup only recently became a “famous” public figure, largely thanks to McQueen’s film. As McQueen emphasized in numerous interviews, Twelve Years a Slave was seldom read even in African American literature classes and was not as well-known as slave narratives such as The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano 1789 and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave 1845 Roy 13-14. That 12 Years a Slave should relate the life of a real nineteenth-century free black man kidnapped into slavery is the main aspect that links it to the category of the biopic. Yet McQueen’s goal has little to do with “[the] genre’s charge, which […] is to enter the biographical subject into the pantheon of cultural mythology, one way or another, and to show why he or she belongs there” Bingham 10. As a violinist who was well integrated in Saratoga’s local community and provided for his family, Northup was in many ways an ordinary citizen, a status that stands in sharp contrast with the usual paradigm of heroization which is emblematic of the classic biopic. McQueen goes against the grain as he re-visions the biopic in a manner similar to Dennis Bingham’s in his 2010 Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre. For Bingham, the genre needs to be reevaluated as a complex, fast-evolving, impure category which can actually invent new ways of looking at the person and rendering his or her experience in some unadulterated way, making it virtually palpable. 2 In McQueen’s earlier movies Hunger 2008 and Shame 2011, the body is a symptom, the product of s ... 7McQueen uses a fractured storyline, artfully weaving past and present. He deploys flashbacks within flashbacks to stage the centrality of the body, which is both his artistic staple and the way in which independent film producers and early African American directors like Oscar Micheaux fought the relegation of black characters to the margins of the frame and In a conversation with Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., he talks about the use of the body in his work as follows All we have is our bodies. That’s our vessel. But what I am interested in is not necessarily that, but the subjects that are around it. […] The story is about the environment, and how individuals have to make sense of it, how we locate the self in events. The body is used, but it’s a byproduct of the bigger question. Gates 191 With the potential “too-much-ness” of unrelenting scenes of violence Gates 191, he voices what Michael Taussig calls “the public secret […] which is generally known, but cannot be articulated” Taussig 5. Countering the current effort to deliberately avoid the awareness of race, he flaunts every possible racial signal so as to “do […] justice” to “what took place in those times” Gates 192. 8In her introduction to Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child similarly commented on this tale of sexual abuse by insisting that even though “[t]his peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled […] the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn” Andrews and Gates 747-748. In her essay “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison suggested as well that her mission was to “rip that veil drawn over proceedings too terrible to relate’” and to expose and articulate the unspeakable in her fiction Zinsser 191. Possibly inscribing it on screen for the first time in such a graphic way, this is also what McQueen resolutely does. The straight cut from the joyful dinner scene in Washington, DC, to the silence and darkness of the cell where Northup Chiwetel Ejiofor has been locked up materializes on screen “the dark night of slavery.” When Douglass uses the phrase in his Narrative, he foregrounds the taming process at work and its devastating effect on body and soul I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute! Andrews and Gates 324 The breaking process starts all the more savagely for Northup as the contrast with his previous circumstances is total. The camera captures him having dinner at a fine restaurant with his white employers and giving a toast to celebrate his successful and profitable tour. Refined classical background music is heard before the straight cut to the dark basement where he finds himself in shackles. 9The brutal shift in atmosphere is thus effected thanks to a straight cut to a dark room and an absence of sounds, until Northup regains consciousness and is startled by the rattle of his chains. A metaphorical and actual “cage” of light visually enacts the dehumanizing process of slavery already at work. Just as rebel leader Joseph Cinqué Djimon Hounsou wrenches off the nail of his manacles in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad 1997, Northup tries to free himself from his chains. His uncomprehending stare at his own irons enacts the unthinkable and compels the viewer to face a world in which freedom has become an irrelevant concept. 10In the source autobiography, Northup describes his terror in the following terms From that moment I was insensible. How long I remained in that condition—whether only that night, or many days and nights—I do not know; but when consciousness returned, I found myself alone, in utter darkness, and in chains. Northup 37-38 After the in medias res beginning, the complex flashback structure of this sequence where at least three different time levels are interwoven allows for an even greater focus on the individual, which is one of the characteristics of the biopic genre. This is paradoxical as it takes place precisely at a time when Northup is denied the status of independent free human being. From this beautifully lit sequence and chiaroscuro shot on, the blurred frontiers between the black and white communities become more and more demarcated. 11Even though McQueen was working within the received conventions of the biopic while adapting a slave narrative, his representation of the black body met with harsh critical comments. The most common charge had to do with the misrepresentation of the black experience on screen and the stereotypical treatment of racial bodies mostly shown as suffering bodies. Historian Margaret Washington, for instance, insisted on the prevalent representation of black people as mere victimized bodies in the film There is no slave community in the movie. Instead, Platt [Northup’s slave name] is a silent observer of enslaved people who assert no agency, no struggle, and do not have a culture or a sense of morality. They are beaten-down victims. Only Platt wants “to live”; others are content to “survive.” However, in the actual narrative Platt describes how he fits into a slave community. He recounts for the reader the personalities, individualities and temperaments of enslaved people, and he relates their culture. […] In the movie, slaves are cotton-picking, cane-cutting stick figures; recipients of white violence; even sexually wanton. Miller 322-323 Ironically, some of McQueen’s early shots register on screen as snapshots of slavery, strange blended families mostly presented as surface images that catch but a fragment of a complex experience. But these early snapshots recomposing new “blended” families quickly interact to form a wider patchwork telling numerous interrelated true stories. Most of the black and white figures McQueen represents on screen end up being full-fledged characters having firmly established roles in a fully developed plantation system. Once Northup has been transported south, the various figures of the plantation unit start to interplay and interact so that the activities and the mindsets of slaves and masters alike are foregrounded. The geographical concentration of the enslaved men and women on the various plantations does not reflect homogenization in their representation, but instead further complicates the slave experience. It highlights for instance slave hierarchies in the plantation culture and the addiction of some masters to their black sex slaves or concubines. 12In 12 Years a Slave the visual and aural shock is so powerful that the debate over placing the black body at the center of the frame is displaced by that of constructing an authentic environment and narrative arc. What the director seems most intent on achieving is, as he told a film critic, “to present this as the life that people lived, and twist it” quoted in Thaggert 332. The film’s first intertitle against a black background—“This film is based on a true story”—is the exact opposite of a disclaimer clause. Everything the director purports to inscribe on screen derives from bona fide sources and therefore fits part of the definition of the biopic, which is to be based on the biography or portions of a historical person’s biography. But contrary to the classic division between “the pre-war biopic [which] tends to address its spectators as citizens [and] the post-war biopic [which] tends to address its spectators as consumers of popular culture” Neale 54, 12 Years a Slave first and foremost addresses the viewers as fully aware and responsible citizens. Blackness visible 13McQueen claims to cling to an authenticity which implies recoding Northup’s 1853 autobiographical narrative into a new set of signs and conventions, as well as a non-glossed-over visual inscription of slavery. As a result, he positions himself beyond debates over truth and falsehood, and sets out to bring about catharsis. Through the prism of film, he makes the viewers intimately touch on the reality of slavery, however briefly. To some extent, this runs contrary to the general goal of the classic biopic dramatizing the lifelong journey of a historically-based individual it ends up glorifying. As he mines the more recent formula of the “slice of life” biopic by focusing on Northup’s time as a slave, McQueen circumvents not only the Great White Male narrative, a vehicle of the dominant reactionary or conservative ideology, but the Great Black Male narrative as well. The multiplicity of viewpoints, especially of African American protagonists in a genre film—one in which “generic identification becomes a formative component of film viewing” Altman 277—then further complicates the issue. Does McQueen productively question how media can make apparent the incoherence and fragmentation of relatively recent real events in American history? And in the wake of four hundred years of slavery, what strategies does he adopt to inscribe both historical facts and fictional narratives on screen in a cohesive and coherent ensemble? Very early on his goal was to help the readers and spectators experience difference and similarity between two sign systems through intersemiotic transposition. Even when reading the book, he was already obsessed by the actual inscription of “those [unadulterated] images” on screen Seeing the images. All I wanted to do was see those images. That has always been the power for me. Seeing those images. When I read the book, I wanted to see those images. Slavery is like the elephant in the room, and what you do is sprinkle flour over it and make it visible. We have to confront this topic in a real way. No one’s blind anymore. No excuses. That’s the power of cinema. Gates 188 With Northup’s reverse trajectory from freedom to slavery and back to freedom, the usual framework of the slave narrative is inverted but also directly questioned as the un-sanitized depiction of slavery causes two time periods to overlap. The contemporary filmgoer’s view of the “peculiar institution” is fundamentally defamiliarized and reshaped as there is an uneasy temporal juxtaposition between the historical moment depicted graphically in the film and a belief that the type of racial inequality once institutionalized by slavery in the nineteenth century, then legally removed in the twentieth, is now completely and fully eradicated in the twenty-first. Thaggert 333 Such a strategy of disjunction and yet proximity between time periods literally and metaphorically plays with focal distance and generates viewer discomfort. Destabilizing the spectator entails focusing on individuated blacks whose complicated life stories interact with whites’. The shapes pain and suffering take in both communities are inscribed on screen in a singularly intense way. Each time, pain is literally embodied in flesh. Whether it be female or male pain, McQueen’s camera gets as close as possible to the suffering subject, at times capturing only part of his or her tortured body within the frame or filming for an excruciatingly long time a scene of near-lynching or whipping. 14In 12 Years a Slave, each disturbing “snapshot” fully extends into a scene or sequence which creates “cinematic discomfort” by “manipulating [the] representation of time and duration” Thaggert 334. McQueen compels the viewer to take in the centrality of the black body as it is both being subjugated and asserting agency and rebellion. From this point of view, the two unusually long scenes of Northup’s near-lynching and Patsey’s Lupita Nyong’o flogging participate in testing representational limits. With such an insistent showing mode, it is no longer possible to accommodate violence, nor is looking away an option. The visual experience of slavery McQueen imposes on the spectator is all the more inescapable as he consistently uses the key trope of violence in new ways. Close-ups of body parts like Northup’s feet barely touching the ground become powerfully metonymic of the whole person fighting “to survive,” as Northup tells Eliza Adepero Oduye. They circumvent any temptation to fetishize black visibility and suffering. They become the symptoms of some greater narrative arc that we have to follow to the end and which bridges the gap with today’s supposedly post-racial America. 15Miriam Thaggert underlines the way in which 12 Years a Slave captures how Americans became accustomed to the violence of slavery and draws a parallel with how they explore today’s racial subtext or confront head-on some overtly problematic racial content His representation charts the desensitization to violence in antebellum America; and […] the reactions to his film may suggest an increasing numbness, or tolerance, for subtle forms of discrimination in our own supposedly postrace America. Thaggert 334 The entire virtually silent scene uncompromisingly inscribes on screen the visual shock of the “photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout America” that collector James Allen uncovered while searching through the nation’s past. His book Without Sanctuary, which came out in 1994, has since then been reissued several times and has given rise to the much-accessed website “Without Sanctuary” complete with photos and a forum. 3 Hélène Charlery makes the case for the central role of Patsey in 12 Years a Slave in her contributi ... 16McQueen and Northup before him rework some of the classic tropes of African American culture. When focusing on enslaved black women, racial desirability and its devastating consequences are no longer exclusively connected to the figures of the tragic mulatta or the disposable “comfort girl.” The fatal attraction Patsey exerts on Epps Michael Fassbender actually gives rise to a long analysis of the young girl’s frame of mind and behavior which prevents the inscription of heavily stereotyped representations of black mistresses and white masters. The staging of the relationship between black sex slave and white master materializes on screen not so much another development of the great white narrative as an in-depth analysis of the girl’s own feelings of entrapment and desperation. The sections of the film relating to Patsey indeed operate as yet another peculiar biopic. In these sequences, the biopic stops being “differential in the role it assigns to gender” Custen 3 and reworks the classic black archetypal figure of the Tragic Woman. Patsey is a “historical person” in her own right Custen 5. She also becomes the focus of the biographical film which is consistently “minimally composed of the life, or the portion of a life, of a real person whose real name is used” Custen 6 even though she is neither a mulatta nor a bereft mother whose children have been sold away like 17Along with the latter, Patsey epitomizes a tragic facet of the objectified and brutalized woman while telling a very personal story. The crude scenes of sexual intercourse between master and slave never achieve any degree of intimacy. Paradoxically, the most intimate moments are those when the young girl is playing, oblivious to her surroundings, and making corn husk dolls. McQueen’s camera frames Patsey lost in the wonder world of childhood, sometimes only partly registering on screen as entire portions of her secret self and life cannot be captured and thus have to remain off screen. McQueen alternates shots focusing on Patsey’s ravaged body being manipulated and violated by the white masters, both male and female, and shots of the young girl asserting her own subjectivity and selfhood as when trying to convince Northup that he should end her life or coming up with strong arguments for Epps not to flog her. 18Hence the visual inscription of pathos and horror alternates with the materialization of self-assertion even if the final shot of Patsey is that of a small figure receding in the background as Northup is extracted from the plantation world. As he leaves behind the slave’s subhuman status, the camera captures him stepping up into the horse carriage on his way to regain his former identity and reintegrate his own New York state community. Shock corridor impossible closure? 19After viewing the film for the first time at the Paris press screening in 2014, members of the audience were left speechless. We had just emerged from what Samuel Fuller once called a “shock corridor” Shock Corridor, 1963 and felt compelled to remain silent, before eventually comparing the forceful impact of the movie with Richard Fleisher’s Mandingo 1975 among other films. The tagline of Fleisher’s film was “Expect the Truth,” and at the time he was one of the very few American moviemakers willing to confront race and slavery in a realistic way Paquet-Deyris, 2014. 20McQueen chooses a similar approach but he also further plays on the conventional tropes of African American culture. He revisits the classic definition and motifs of the biopic to make blackness visible in a contemporary Hollywood film and a context of white-controlled mass media organizations. Mediating Northup’s literary source, he turns it into a central filmic text imposing on the viewer a methodology to foreground underrepresented black bodies, experiences, and histories. He thus promotes a new kind of American national identity bypassing the frequent critical comment that “Blacks appear less individuated, more homogeneous [as] film reinforces Whites’ ignorance of Blacks’ variety and humanity” Entman and Rojecki 182. According to some critics, in order to come up with rich and complex ethnic and racial representations on screen, he sometimes overdoes the self-conscious capture of the past. Jim Down’s reaction is also typical of the type of visceral reactions the movie generated Unlike other films, or even books for that matter, that have the ability to transport me to another time and place, that make me forget that I am sitting in a movie theater, 12 Years a Slave did not achieve that level of literary, imaginative migration. Instead I could feel the director’s, screenwriters’, and actors’ efforts to so self-consciously capture the past. Miller 313 But through the emphasis on violence, the director, screenwriter, and cast allow the movie to clearly materialize what Toni Morrison calls “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” Morrison, fully disclosed on a global scale.