12 Years A Slave
Directed by Steve McQueen
Released 2013
Genre: Biography, Drama, History
Themes: Crime, Racism, Slavery, Relationships, Family, Injustice, Freedom
Performance: Emotional films that pride themselves mainly on being a 'hard watch' often rely quite heavily on performance for if not for that, there really wouldn't be any emotion to it. If during a very sadistic scene the actor's were smiling, nobody would be able to take it seriously. For this reason, this film's performance simply had to be terrific or the movie probably wouldn't have been half as successful. There's one scene in particular that really drove home the power of performance and how it can create meaning though. With no dialogue, minimal assistance from mise-en-scene to get the point across and the wide shot to show the performance truly, it was a very big reality check within the film for me. When the protagonist, Solomon, A.K.A, Plat, was hanging from a tree, hands bound, struggling to breathe, every character was simply going about their day. In the background we saw fellow slaves take no notice of him at all. This was just an every day thing to them. Not important enough to even be considered an event worthy of discussion. Slaves were property and looking at a black person hanging from a tree was like seeing a broken toy carelessly dismissed on the side of the road.
Sound: The music is also a very powerful tool used by the director to pile on the emotion in every scene possible. I can't recall a scene where the non-diagetic sound was not in minor key and considering that song's using the minor key tend to speak more to the woeful, it stands to reason that a film run by horribly sad events that really did happen would stick to minor key music. The long, drawn out violin strokes and lone piano were very powerful in some key points during the movie although I don't know much about sound as far as film's go, it was painfully apparent even to me.
Released 2013
Genre: Biography, Drama, History
Themes: Crime, Racism, Slavery, Relationships, Family, Injustice, Freedom
Performance: Emotional films that pride themselves mainly on being a 'hard watch' often rely quite heavily on performance for if not for that, there really wouldn't be any emotion to it. If during a very sadistic scene the actor's were smiling, nobody would be able to take it seriously. For this reason, this film's performance simply had to be terrific or the movie probably wouldn't have been half as successful. There's one scene in particular that really drove home the power of performance and how it can create meaning though. With no dialogue, minimal assistance from mise-en-scene to get the point across and the wide shot to show the performance truly, it was a very big reality check within the film for me. When the protagonist, Solomon, A.K.A, Plat, was hanging from a tree, hands bound, struggling to breathe, every character was simply going about their day. In the background we saw fellow slaves take no notice of him at all. This was just an every day thing to them. Not important enough to even be considered an event worthy of discussion. Slaves were property and looking at a black person hanging from a tree was like seeing a broken toy carelessly dismissed on the side of the road.
Sound: The music is also a very powerful tool used by the director to pile on the emotion in every scene possible. I can't recall a scene where the non-diagetic sound was not in minor key and considering that song's using the minor key tend to speak more to the woeful, it stands to reason that a film run by horribly sad events that really did happen would stick to minor key music. The long, drawn out violin strokes and lone piano were very powerful in some key points during the movie although I don't know much about sound as far as film's go, it was painfully apparent even to me.
Great Analysis.
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