Recently I saw the film '12 years a slave' and I left disappointed at the end. I liked the restraint of the musical score. But the film was too clean, and a farm that seemed to have nearly no animals, dogs, cats, vermin or cattle, seemed improbable. And the teeth of the slaves were that bright that the film could have been sponsored by Colgate. Never mind that my friend said 'The script was 'stagey'', it was slavery as it would have been portrayed by Walt Disney, somewhat shorn of the actuality.
Filming historic injustice properly will always be difficult. This is why there are so many mediocre films about resisting or succumbing to Nazism. When the films are bad it is often because they are dressed and set according later, higher, peacetime standards of health and wealth than would be authentic to the time. Also the scripts do not tackle or reveal the moral weakness and dependencies inherent in The Nazi System. For instance the guards in the camps are often portrayed as blind to what they depend on, slave labour, and yet they are so close to it they know they need some basic good will from their captives to extract their labour from them, even as the guards they are meant to be so all knowing that they did not have any regard their prisoners. One of the films which proved the exception to this rule for me was the German film 'The Counterfeiters' where the guards were ordinary sadists going about their duty, with some of them proving the exception through small acts of kindness which seemed all the bigger in the circumstances. One of the more memorable scenes was a Christmas where the soldiers and guards danced with each other to music from a phonograph, and passed around minatures of alcohol. Scenes like that seemed to pull in to view the real life that was happening just off to the edge of the script/screen, which in the watching you were encouraged to believe was there but which needed some prompt to push it onto the screen.
Nearly nowhere in '12 years a slave' was the insecurity of the slave masters, or their moral lassitude, laid bare. The weaknesses of slave owners was with-held even between slave owners. The only ill effect of dependence in the slaves owners came mostly in portrayals of periodic drunkenness, which seemed to leave no long term mark on them, though the increased terror of the slaves when they saw their master drunk and ill tempered was telling. But the idea that the best slave owners remained sober the better to get the best from themselves and their slaves was notably absent. I was grateful when there were scenes that would enlighten an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where links were made between the wretched treatment of slaves and the abuse of alcohol. As a film about an iniquitous economic system it sort-of worked. I wish that the economics of mortgages slave owners took out on slaves, where slaves were sold on to other slave masters, to repay the mortgage, could have been explored more fully.
The glaring paradox of a white culture wedded to a literate and numerate protestant work ethic which was dependent on denying black slaves any similar reward and autonomy for their labour would have made a powerful story, and such ideas were possible but were commented on only in passing, from a slaves eye view, which mostly seemed to be frozen in horror. The portrayal of how slaves who revealed they could read and write, would be killed by their masters was telling-but by inference rather than something shown on screen. Slaves were meant to settle for an oral culture in they could neither write nor read, but through their labour they could be kept, and even the oral culture had it's limits in consistency, slave's names were changed as they were sold-to cut off any sense of being potentially freedmen, with full civil rights. To be named by a slave master made the individual their property to sell or keep. I very much appreciated that it took somebody who was kidnapped to know the difference between being a slave and a freed man, because it was clearly very difficult for a slave who was raised a slave since childhood to de-condition themselves from being merely kept labour.
If that was all a kidnapped slave could see, and they reported well on what they saw, then fine. Perhaps me asking slaves to speak for the insecurities of their masters, and the darkness of such a system, was asking too much. Yet I feel that such a script being filmed is now more possible, with '12 years a slave' breaking the taboo of talking about slavery as a live evil, and the film has put the big moral issue up on the big screen.
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