Twelve Years A Slave Q&A / Interview

The promotion team for the film made from Solomon Northup's slave narrative,  Twelve Years A Slave, has been intelligently orchestrating the stages of publicity in measured levels of increasing density all this month, as the film opens here for a limited run on Friday, the 18th. They've placed an add plus trailer that runs every day on the digital NYT site, and an ad in the print edition.

It was screen three time for press and other interested sorts last week, one of which we attended.

This week it's interviews with the principals and Others. In this New York Times Q&A the Others are Eric Foner noted historian of slavery and Reconstruction, and the artist, Kara Walker.

The artist, Kara Walker, criticizes Northup the man for not being the hero that Frederic Douglass is in his own slave narrative. She objects that Northup doesn't do enough for another slave. He isn't able to do anything. As as slave within a system in a particularly brutal and rigid region that was organized specifically to keep Northup in his place -- if he objects or disobeys he's dead. He knows that. He is still hoping to be somehow reunited with his New York family. He nearly was dead more than once. It wasn't other slaves who saved him, because they CANNOT. Yet Walker seems to think he was particularly selfish in not getting himself killed in a quixotic move that would only have made terrible things even worse.

I'm assuming the NY Times editor, not the interviewer, who, being Nelson George, is responsible for the language idiocy of calling movies that have to do in one way or another with our national heritage of racism a staple in Hollywood because four films featuring people of color have been made in two years -- two of those centering white people, The Help and the Tarantino travesty, which is anything but an historical portrayal (it takes place in the same Louisiana region as Twelve Years a Slave).

I found the interview / q&a of interest because of bits like this:

Quote:
Chiwetel, how did you balance what’s going on in the world with [Northup’s] reality? 
Chiwetel Ejiofor That wasn’t the approach for me. I was trying to tell the story of Solomon Northup as he experienced his life. He didn’t know where all this was going. My journey started finishing a film in Nigeria. The last day, I went to the slave museum in Calabar, which was four or five rooms and some books, some interesting drawings of what they thought happened to people when the boats took them over. I left the following day and came to Louisiana. In my own way, I traveled that route.
Quote:
Professor, your reaction to the film, its place in the contemporary discussion about slavery. 
Eric Foner I believe this is a piece of history that everybody — black, white, Asian, everybody — has to know. You cannot understand the United States without knowing about the history of slavery. Having said that, I don’t think we should go too far in drawing parallels to the present. Slavery was a horrific institution, and it is not the same thing as stop and frisk. In a way, putting it back to slavery takes the burden off the present. The guys who are acting in ways that lead to inequality today are not like the plantation owner. They’re guys in three-piece suits. They’re bankers who are pushing African-Americans into subprime mortgages. 

I agree with Eric Foner, obviously, since I have spent my life researching, studying and writing the history of these very matters, starting with Africa and the Caribbean. I have spent the last four years of my life writing The American Slave Coast, a history of these matters here in the U.S. This is the central fact of our nation, that it was built upon the buying and selling of people, and this fact has not faded away into the obscuring mists of time, but rather keeps mutating and twisting its evil into the cores of our national behavior every day.