Years a Slave movie-analysis

The environment in the movie is characterized by mainly powerful white people, and В«naggersВ» as slaves. Some grown up like a slave, some kidnapped and who had been forced into that type of life. It is possible for a black person to be a В«freeВ» man, but then he’d have to have papers saying he is. The movie is about the black man Solomon who lives happily with his wife and two kids in Saratoga, New York. While his wife is away for a couple of weeks with the kids, he’s offered a gig, playing violin with a couple of men in Washington.

He is promised good money to do it, and he’ll be back long before his wife. After a week in Washington, earning about 50 dollars, they celebrate the success of the shows, and the men he traveled with get him drunk. When he wakes up sober he’s in a basement in the city, with chained on both hands and feet. He is then told by a white man multiple times that he is a В«runaway slaveВ» from Georgia. Something he refuses to say, and it gets him a great deal of whippings on his back. He and others are then put on a boat to Louisiana where they’re sold.

Solomon is sold to a plantation owner for 1000$, and is sent with him to is home. He works there for quite a while, but there’s a conflict between him and one of the В«MastersВ» there, which makes him have to leave to another plantation to work. There’s a lot of complications, and he’s in the middle of a lot of it. He meets different persons, and one of them is the savior to his 12 year lasting hell. There is a man who helps free Solomon from slavery, who helps him become a free man again. The movie takes up a lot of subjects. One obvious is slavery. There is also discrimination of women and human trafficking.

When en of the plantation owners talk down to his wife, and treats her like she has nothing to say about stuff, it shows how he thinks of her as less than himself. He discriminates her inferno of the slaves. Human trafficking is because that’s what they’ve did when they kidnapped Solomon and brought him somewhere else to sell him as a slave. The plot is not presented in a cosmological way. It starts off with him as a slave, and then it goes back to how he actually became one. Found to symbols that I remember most. The first one is when he breaks the violin that he’s written his family’s name on.

I take that as a symbol of him loosing hope. Giving up. He no longer believes he’ll get home again, safe with his family. The second symbol is after he talked to the Canadian guy. When he agrees to write to hose friends in the north. He then looks into the camera for a good 10-seconds shot, and that gives me the feeling that he yet again believes. He believes that he’ll meet his family someday. He regains hope. Solomon Northup, is the character and he’s very clear about being a free man from the beginning. He says that he shouldn’t be treated the way he was and is to to do what others tell him to.

He really fights to get justice for the colored people. Mr.. Peps was Northup last В«masterВ» and was an alcoholic who abused women both physically psychological. He’s an evil man and has no conscience at all. Patsy is one of Mr.. Peps slaves and gets sexually abused by him. She’s abused by both Mr.. And Mrs.. Peps, and it’s so bad that she asks Solomon to kill her, because she can’t do it herself. What jump starts the plot is when Solomon wakes up in the basement cellar after being kidnapped, and is chained on both hands and feet. This part really makes o intrigued on what’s going to happen next.

You need to know. The movie highlight is when Bass agrees to write Solomon friends, and the part when the men come to take Solomon from the plantation. That is because it’s when we know for sure then that Bass had kept his promise. The conflicts in the movie are not all resolved, because they still have slaves. None of the kidnappers or abusers are convicted. But the biggest conflict is resolved when he is set free and gets to live as a free man again. To highlight that this time period is a long time ago, they use old fashioned loathes and talk with a really southern accent.

But apart from that, the movie is in great quality because it was filmed in 2012-13. The director zoomed in on Solomon a lot the most of the time and seems to focus on him through the whole movie, there are often quite long clips of Solomon alone. That might be because the director wants to shows his feelings, body language and reactions to things that happen. Some sounds in the movie are really highlighted, for example the whipping. The volume gets turned up so that it almost seems extra bad and can almost make you feel the whip strokes.