Twelve Years A Slave has been making waves over in the US, so I decided that I couldnt wait for the January 28 UK release and watched it online. It was... Well... It was something. I made sure to actually read Solomon Northups book beforehand, which is available free here: https://archive.org/stream/twelveyearsasla01nortgoog#page/n8/mode/2up The best way to explain how I felt about the film is by quoting a fantastic passage from Neil Gaimans American Gods: There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain. Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives. A life that is, like any other, unlike any other. Twelve Years a Slave is an exceptional film because, just for a moment, it creates a bridge to your island. Sliding out of Solomon Northups head untouched, without considering your own life, is almost impossible. His life was unlike any other, but tragically like so many others. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Posted on: Mon, 09 Dec 2013 05:17:24 +0000
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