by Andrew Anthony)
Directed by the British artist and film-maker Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave has gained almost universal critical praise. In his review for the New Yorker, David Denby echoed the consensus opinion when he described it as "easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery".
But in America many people have asked why it has taken so long for a film to do justice to the appalling plight of African America's slave ancestors and why no US film-makers have succeeded before in confronting their country's shameful past with such unflinching power and historical accuracy. Variety said it was a "disgrace" that, after so long, it has taken "a British director to stare the issue in its face".
By turns visually beautiful and viscerally brutal, 12 Years a Slave is based on the autobiography of Solomon Northup, a free man from upstate New York, who was lured to Washington DC in 1841, kidnapped and sold into slavery. He quickly learns that if he is to survive, he must renounce his education, cease pleading for his liberty and endure a regime of unspeakable violence.
The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Northup and Michael Fassbender as the ferociously sadistic slave master Edwin Epps – both actors, along with McQueen and the film itself, are tipped to win Oscars. McQueen has explored the psychological and physical torments of confinement before in Hunger, his film about Bobby Sands's hunger strike. And he has plumbed the murky depths of male sexuality in Shame. But here he brings together both those elements and much more in a way that is guaranteed to shock and move audiences.
The historical consultant on the film was the distinguished historian, literary critic and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who was also the consultant on Steven Spielberg's film of slave revolt, Amistad. In the 1990s Gates became an academic star in America, revolutionising African-American studies and bringing together at Harvard a so-called "dream team" of black intellectuals that featured, among others, Cornel West and Kwame Anthony Appiah. His considerable creative output includes books, documentaries and, for a period in the late 1990s, a number of celebrated journalistic pieces for the New Yorker.
He has been called "the chief interpreter of the black experience for white America", although he would prefer to emphasise his professional commitment to the black community.
In recent years he has turned to genealogy and DNA testing to uncover the African-American histories buried by slavery. A cinephile who nurtured childhood dreams of becoming a film director, Gates has called 12 Years a Slave "the most vivid and authentic portrayal of American slavery ever captured on screen".
The competition for that title has not been great. As a historian of the genre, Gates knows better than most that American (and British colonial) slave history has too often been sanitised and even sentimentalised on film, including in such classics as Gone With the Wind.
"Steve's film," he says, "is a refreshingly honest depiction of slavery as it really was."
How did you get involved with Steve McQueen and 12 Years a Slave?
With Steve, we were sort of two ships in the night for years. As a student of cultural studies and black British art, I knew about him and his work. I'd written about the black renaissance in Britain and I had long admired his work as a visual artist. But we had never met. I later found out that he had read some of my work such as The Signifying Monkey in college. Steve called me last summer and we had a long conversation. Since then I've talked to him two dozen times. But we didn't finally meet until the Toronto film festival. It was a big disappointment to miss the wrap party. Of course I wanted to meet Brad Pitt!
As for the film, I got a phone call from the producer, Jeremy Kleiner. He asked me if I would be a consultant. I read Solomon Northup in graduate school. I have edited a series of Penguin books called the black classics, which included 12 Years a Slave. So I said to Jeremy: "Sure, I'd be happy to." I'd already been consultant for Steven Spielberg on Amistad, so I knew the drill. I read the script and I thought it was brilliant. I'd known about [American writer and director] John Ridley before, but never read one of his scripts. Then I became actively involved with the texts at the end of the film.
Could you envisage the book as a film?
Well, there was a TV film made of it already in 1984. So it's not a surprise to anyone who's watched PBS. It just wasn't a Hollywood film. I remember Avery Brooks [as lead character Solomon Northup] did an amazing job. And although I haven't watched it again, it was to my knowledge the first time a slave narrative was made into a feature film. There were exactly 101 slave narratives written by fugitive slaves between 1760 and 1865 and another 101 published after 1865. So there were 202 written accounts by former slaves and only one slave narrative has been made into a feature film.
In recent years, there has been Spielberg's Lincoln, which deals at least discursively with the issue of slavery, and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, which is rather more explicit. And now 12 Years A Slave. Why do you think slavery has suddenly become a cinematic subject?
Lincoln is in a different category, but Steven Spielberg made a brilliant choice by avoiding a biopic. But it's only indirectly about slavery. There have in fact been dozens of films about slavery. Most of them apologetic films. The moonbeams and magnolia fantasies of white dominance. One key example is The Birth of a Nation, which shows how lascivious and rapacious and venal black people were. They had to be controlled by slavery; if not, they would rape white women. That was clearly a white racist fantasy.
Then you have black power fantasies such as Mandingo, in which the black male takes revenge on the white woman with his irresistible sexuality. So it's not the subject matter that makes Steve's film or Quentin's film unique. It's the way they address slavery. And they address slavery in polar opposite ways. I did a three-part interview with Quentin for [online magazine of African-American culture] The Root that went viral. I looked at the questions, raised in Django, of whether slaves rode horses and if dogs ever ate slaves [yes and yes – in Haiti]. The fury over Django reminds me of Georg Lukács's argument over modernism and realism in the 30s. Quentin Tarantino made the world's first postmodern slave spaghetti western and probably the last. Steve's film is very different – it's a realist take on slavery.
But I think Quentin deserved the best screenplay Academy Award for Django and I think John Ridley deserves it this year. And Steve best director. And Chiwetel Ejiofor [who plays Solomon in the new film] for best actor. I asked Steve how Chiwetel achieved so much with his eyes and he said he got him to study Rudolph Valentino films. I also think Michael Fassbender should win best supporting actor but, hey, I'm biased.
But coming back to Hollywood's interest in slavery – curiously, we have more historical scholarship about the slave trade than ever before. Thanks to people like Professor David Eltis, we now know there were more than 36,000 voyages from Africa to the new world. The detail of the data is really quite remarkable. So the slave trade is a subject whose time has come. Steve says it's the Obama effect. Many people have said there is a renaissance in black film. I think it's partly about the coming of age of the affirmative-action generation, the people who were able to get into white institutions and then start black studies programmes in the university. My generation or the students after us. That is probably the most important factor in terms of the nation. You have to remember the black middle class has quadrupled. So that's also a big increase in consumers.
What do you think the legacy of slavery is in terms of the black experience in America today?
In 1860, when the last federal census before the civil war was held, there were 4.4 million African Americans, only 10% of whom were free. So right there you have the breakdown of the talented tenth [the term popularised by WEB Du Bois as a reference to the black American leaders required to lift black Americans out of poverty and discrimination]. Where in other communities there has been a tripartite class system, that has not obtained for the black community. Instead, it's remained a 90/10 split. The percentage of blacks living under the poverty line is about the same as when Martin Luther King was killed.
I made a TV series about African American history called Many Rivers to Cross. If you look at the final episode, you think it would end with the triumph of Obama's election. I even have Colin Powell crying on camera when I ask him how he felt about Obama being elected. But then we end with a black man unjustly imprisoned for 11 years, arrested on a trumped-up charge of concealing cocaine on a bus. It's the new Jim Crow, as Michelle Alexander called it, the horrendously huge population of [imprisoned] black males. It's the best of times for the black community. It's the worst of times. I'm hoping that 12 Years a Slave serves as an allegory of what it is like to be a free man being kidnapped and falsely imprisoned. And this would be the case of all these men in prison as a result of the three-strikes laws [which have meant that a petty crime can lead to a life sentence if the offender has been found guilty of two previous crimes].
One of the qualities of slavery that the film illustrates is the manner in which violence is normalised so that empathy becomes a luxury that few can afford to feel. Do you think this brutalisation continues to affect black America?
Well, there is a scene in the film, what I call the tippy-toe scene, when Solomon is suspended by his neck and has to balance on his toes. Only one slave, a woman, gives him water. Only one slave comes to his aid. So that's it exactly. There were always people defeated by the system. And always people who transcended the system. There's no magic formula for it. Should we be surprised that a system that started in the British colonies in the 1690s and didn't end to 1865 and was then followed by a century of Jim Crow has an ongoing effect? Obviously, the black community has never had more power than it has today. But too large a segment of the black community is economically disenfranchised.
The African slave trade is often discussed as a problem almost unique to the United States, but in fact less than 5% of slaves ended up in the US. How did slavery in the US compare with slavery elsewhere in the Americas?
The figures are that 12.5 million Africans got on the boats; 10.7 million got off the boats – the rest died at sea in appalling conditions. Of the remainder, 388,000 came to the United States. To get some perspective on that, Jamaica got a million and Brazil six million. The reason we think of it as an American phenomenon is the visible power of the civil rights movement in America. Even I was shocked. If you asked me when I was a graduate, I would have thought the US had a much larger share. After the importation of slaves was made illegal in the US [in 1808], slave owners turned to breeding slaves. But in other countries, it was cheaper to replace slaves from Africa than breed them. It was brutal in America but you were encouraged to have a family. There was a premium on keeping slaves alive and have them reproduce. It was much more brutal in other places.
It's hard to think of how much more brutal slavery could have been than that depicted in 12 Years a Slave. From a crude cost-benefit analysis, the slave owner's horrendous treatment of his slaves seemed counterproductive. I think we can see the contradictions inherent in slave ownership through Michael Fassbender's brilliant portrayal of Edwin Epps [the cruel plantation owner to whom Solomon is sold]. When I saw the way he rendered him it was a revelation. My god, it's in the text of Solomon's book and I didn't think of it that way. There has never been a slave master in the history of Hollywood portrayed with more depth. He comes off as a man inexplicably in love with a slave [Patsey, one of the women employed on the plantation] and he can't figure out why. He almost beats her to death and rapes her. He is insanely jealous. I think these are the contradictions at the heart of owning another human being.
You've become something of an expert in genealogy, including your own. I read that you were 56% white, 37% African and 7% Native American. Why is black ancestry so often seen as the decisive factor in determining ethnic identity?
That was measured by the old system. It goes like this now: I'm 50% European and 50% African. But the point about black identity, that's a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. It's called the "one drop" principle, in which one drop of black blood defined you as black. It's preserved curiously enough by people who believe in essentialised racial identities as well as many black people who you would think would oppose it. For black people, they wanted their group to be as large as possible – because more people equals more power – and therefore they didn't want anyone to escape. And the white people, they wanted to keep their bloodlines pure. But I have news for them: the bloodlines have never been pure. Thirty five per cent of all African American men descend from white people – just like I do. The admixture of the average African American is about 20% European. That means because of slavery we are a very mixed people, the African Americans. But so are white people. About 5% of white people, if they had their DNA checked, would be kicked out of their race. These classifications are old habits of a racist order that are difficult to break.
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