Where Can I Watch 12 Years A Slave Free

[Victorio Galindo]

LupitaNyong'o and Chiwetel Ejiofor in the Oscar-nominated 12 Years a Slave. Director Steve McQueen and film editor Joe Walker took a restrained, formal approach to portraying the "casual nightmare" of American slavery. Francois Duhamel/Fox Searchlight Pictures hide caption

"Editing is like a massive, 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle," says director Steve McQueen. He's just arrived from Europe and is relaxing in a suite in a swanky West Hollywood hotel with the film's editor, Joe Walker.

Walker edited McQueen's previous feature films, Hunger and Shame. The two share a taste for experimentation. Walker was trained as a classical composer; McQueen comes from the art world. When they remember their first rough assemblage of footage for 12 Years A Slave, they use words like "horribly wrong" and "nightmarish."

"There was one scene that we were struggling with, a scene when Solomon [Northup, the film's main character] boards a steamship," remembers Walker. "He's being kidnapped, and he's transported south to be sold into slavery."

But editing that terrible, disorienting voyage to Louisiana proved a problem. It was taking too long, and was further complicated by the production's sizable investment to build an authentic steamboat. The 10-week edit was taking place in Amsterdam, where McQueen lives. So one night Walker, in a fit of frustration, went out and bought "some international prize-winning skunk."

"It was amazing," McQueen recalls. "It abbreviated the scene, but you felt the journey because of the physicality of the music and [the sense that] you were coming closer to something. This inevitable dark ending, to be sold down the river."

The music eventually used in the scene, by Hans Zimmer, was inspired by Andriessen. Generally, though, Walker and McQueen tried to avoid music in favor of natural sounds: the ominous rumble of Louisiana thunder, or slaves laboring on a plantation.

12 Years A Slave's editing has been described by critics as formal and classical, partly for its use of restrained, unbroken shots. They are partly a conscious refusal to look away from slavery's ongoing depravations, faced particularly in the film by a young woman named Patsey.

At another point, the filmmakers wanted to illustrate both the physical and psychic traumas of slavery, together, in one wide-angle shot. As a punishment, Solomon Northup is strung by his neck from a tree for hours, so he's barely able to breathe.

In the film, an individual called Solomon Northup is a free African-American man who is kidnapped in Washington, D.C. by two con men/swindlers in the year 1841. Northup is played by the phenomenal actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, who not only won an Academy Award for the film, but has numerous other awards as well.

Viewers will love the actors and how each character has their own personal story; they will get to know each character intimately, and because of that, this film will make their eyeballs bawl! Viewers will feel different emotions as they watch the characters build hope, and then experience heartbreak: depending on the event, viewers can anticipate feelings of rage, sorrow, and satisfaction. And above all, as they watch they will have numerous questions as to how a free man was obligated to be in slavery.

Solomon Northup is steadfast: He will not let anyone rob him of his humanity and his central identity. Through decades of strife, he maintains a modicum of hope to fight against his despair. A few other characters display kindness in cruel times, specifically the Canadian abolitionist, Bass.

Characters are strung up on a tree and hanged; in one prolonged scene, one man struggles mightily not to be choked, and it's tough to watch him. Men and women are beaten, sometimes with whips, and publicly, too. The "N" word is hurled left and right; a master forces himself on a slave. Two men engage in a fistfight; another man is stabbed, his body hurled overboard a ship. One close-up shows the bloody aftermath of a horrible, extended lashing.

Parents need to know that 12 Years a Slave is a harrowing, moving drama based on a book written in the 1850s by Solomon Northup recounting his experiences as a slave, and it can be difficult to watch. There are scenes that show extreme brutality (beatings, hangings) and rough language (the use of the "N" word), and extreme emotional cruelty. Expect some slave market nudity, plus the sexual assault of a slave by a master. Very young teens and tweens may find it too intense, but older teens should watch it to bear witness to a tragic part of American history. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails.

An accomplished violinist and free man living in the state of New York, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) agrees in 1841 to tour with two gentlemen and perform while his family is away visiting relatives. Sadly, they were no gentlemen and there was no tour. Instead, they kidnap him, sneak him to the South and sell him as a slave. No matter how many times Northup says he's a free man, no one believes him, least of which the slave trader (Paul Giamatti) who insists on naming him "Platt." His first master, William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), means well, but is scared off by neighbors who won't let him be kind to his workers. Northup's second master, Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), is a forbidding, troubled taskmaster who preys on a female slave, Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o), who then becomes the subject of cruelty at the hands of Epps' embittered wife, Mary (Sarah Paulson). Will Northup ever be free? Will the man from Canada named Bass (Brad Pitt) help or betray him? And how will he survive, both spirit and mind intact?

Inspired by real-life events, 12 YEARS A SLAVE is punishing and demoralizing to watch, so committed is director Steve McQueen to tell this story unwaveringly. You will leave the theater reminded of the wretched brutality that men and women have been, and still are, capable of, and it will leave you untethered. But a must-see it is. McQueen, for the most part, exerts restraint where a lesser director may have belabored the endeavor with overstuffed frames, waves of music, and speechifying, most of which he avoids here. Casting Ejiofor was a stroke of brilliance. He is magnetic, embodying the character so fully we believe in his resolve not to founder, and suffer when he does. Fassbender is Ejiofor's counterpart as the frightening Epps, and he's just as watchable, if not as sublime. His rendering is a little less nuanced, but compelling nonetheless.

12 Years a Slave goes slack as it marches toward the end, sputtering when it should crescendo. The ending, truthful as it may be, feels anti-climactic and rushed, more intellectually satisfying than emotionally fulfilling. But weeks after, the film will still sit with you, its impact weighty.

Do you think the amount of violence in this movie helps viewers get a realistic understanding of the experience of slavery? Or is it gratuitous? Does the fact that the violence is in a historical context make it more (or less) tolerable?

If afterwards you are hungry for some readings to delve into the theo-ethical problems that Christians confront in and through this story, I humbly suggest the following: anything written by James Cone, M. Shawn Copeland, Bryan Massingale, Emilie Townes, or Diana Hayes. OK, let me try to be more specific.

African Americans have encountered monstrous evil in chattel slavery and its legacy of virulent institutionalized racism and have been subjected to unspeakable physical, psychological, social, moral, and religious affliction and suffering. Yet, from the anguish of our people rose distinctive religious expression, exquisite music and song, powerful rhetoric and literature, practical invention and creative art. If slavery was the greatest evil, freedom was the greatest good and women and men struggled, suffered, sacrificed, and endured much to attain it. [137].

These are narratives of affliction, but not narratives of despair; the women may be caught, but they are not trapped. These Black women wade through their sorrows, managing their suffering, rather than being managed by it. [148].

Many of our predecessors, including St. Gregory the Great, Hadrian I, Alexander III, Innocent III, Gregory IX, Pius II, Leo X, Paul III, Urban VIII, Benedict XIV, Pius VII, and Gregory XVI, made every effort to ensure that the institution of slavery should be abolished where it existed and that its roots should not revive where it had been destroyed.

The interpretation of scripture and tradition by which the church supported [slavery] was a product of the times and the conditions of society during those times. Nonetheless, this interpretation was immoral then and still is today. [74-75]

Why are ye silent, ye free men and women of the north? Why do your tongues falter in maintenance of the right? Would that I had more ability! But my heart is so full, and my pen is so weak! There are noble men and women who plead for us, striving to help those who cannot help themselves. God bless them! God give them the strength and courage to go on! God bless those everywhere who are laboring to advance the cause of humanity! [Kindle location 418]

The sad reality is that the Catholic Church has been rather complicit in slavery. Popes and religious orders owned slaves, slavery was legal in the papal states, a number of US Bishops owned slaves in 1860 and taught that slavery was OK. Not to mention all those Catholic schools which were once segregated and the sad fact that our first black U.S. priest had to be trained in Rome as no U.S. seminary would have him.

I sometimes wonder what things the Church is wrong about today which will become apparent in future years. I expect that the way we have mistreated our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters will be one of them.

Did Slavery really end with the Civil War? The documentary Slavery by Another Name explores how in the years following the Emancipation Proclamation, systematic approaches were taken to re-enslave newly freed Blacks in the United States. This system included new brutal methods of forced labor in which men were arrested and forced to work without pay, bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters.

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