Filming slavery, as if

Rico says his friend Kema forwards this post in The New Yorker by Richard Brody:

Looming over the critical discussion of 12 Years a Slave are two widely misinterpreted remarks by two French directors: Jacques Rivette’s denunciation of “the tracking shot in Kapò” (Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1960 drama, set in a concentration camp) and Claude Lanzmann’s disdain for archival footage that he excluded from Shoah. Their ideas express moral doubt regarding the notion of representing the Holocaust and extend to a rejection of the dramatic depiction of any historical horror. As a result, modern directors— and, even more, modern critics— labor in fear of fiction; at Criticwire, Sam Adams collects some reviews of 12 Years a Slave that express this fear, and another one worth mentioning is Melissa Anderson’s, at artforum.com, in which she mentions Lanzmann’s film. The question is whether the director Steve McQueen has trivialized or exploited Solomon Northup’s and other slaves’ sufferings by the very act of treating slavery as a collection of dramatic incidents no less ripe for naturalistic cinematic depiction than any novel or latter-day true-crime story.
That’s why there’s a shadow movie just off-screen beside 12 Years a Slave, one that wouldn’t show the abduction, enslavement, and brutalization of Solomon Northup at all. Instead of treating the story of Solomon Northup’s abduction and enslavement as a naturalistic drama, the shadow movie would depict the very possibility of filming the story. It might involve the discovery, by Steve McQueen or a fictionalized stand-in for him, of Northup’s book; it might show the rediscovery of the book, which had languished, out of print, for almost a century. It could begin with Northup returning home after his liberation from slavery, and telling the tale of his enslavement to explain his twelve-year absence from home (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story Wakefield, one of his Twice-Told Tales from 1837, might serve as a template). It might follow the circuit of acquaintances and efforts that resulted in his dictation of his as-told-to book (Northup’s amanuensis was David Wilson), which might give rise to on-screen dramatizations of the experiences that Northup narrates— or maybe not.
It’s certainly true that extreme experience calls for extreme invention— that the sort of workmanlike filmmaking that might pass muster as no worse than unobtrusive for a genre story seems repellent when applied to matters of great moral moment or unfathomable intensities of pain, violence, or, for that matter, pleasure. It’s the difference between boredom and outrage, or just ridicule (as with McQueen’s previous film, Shame, with its comically banal efforts to plumb the mysteries of sex). I wrote last year about the hopeless clichés of several Holocaust-related films and suggested that the very ease of representation that they reflect is part of the problem.
But I’m glad that McQueen didn’t doubt the power of dramatic filmmaking when he turned his attention to 12 Years a Slave. It’s a didactic film, in the very best sense of the word, even, dare I say, a Brechtian film. It doesn’t break the fourth wall with a master of ceremonies or call attention to its sketch-like abstraction by undercutting dramatic identification. Rather, McQueen cannily uses, as a virtual framing device, the public’s knowledge regarding the general historical fact of slavery in America and the particular understanding that Northup is a real person whose book conveys actual experience. It’s as if McQueen himself were standing beside the screen with a pointer, calmly but frankly filling in the barest outlines of common knowledge with the staggeringly painful particulars of Northup’s story and, therefore, of American history.
There’s no point to debating whether slavery in America is or isn’t “as bad”, or as horrific a crime, as the Holocaust. They’re both awful; they’re different. The question of representation turns, first, on the simple fact that Shoah was made in the nineteen-seventies, thirty years after the end of the Second World War, when many survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators were still alive. (Earlier, I wondered why no interview-film regarding slavery was made as soon as talking pictures were invented). But there’s another crucial difference that common language makes clear: though the term “the Holocaust” is immediately identified with extermination, the term “slavery” is widely associated with involuntary servitude— with unremitting labor. When we say that we’re slaving away at our desk, it means we’re doing hard or dull work demanded by our bosses; it doesn’t imply physical violence or the threat of death— and that’s exactly what McQueen restores to the term and to the idea, in all of its horror and monstrosity.
McQueen shows that slavery is, first and foremost, a matter of dominion over the slave’s body— that the economic and legal concept of owning another person implies the unchecked authority to kill, rape, maim, wound, torture, and terrorize, and that only the constant threat of death and agony keeps people docile in their enslavement. The story of 12 Years a Slave is fundamentally one of pain and terror, and McQueen— bravely, unshrinkingly, and with no apparent pleasure— compels himself to represent it.
The movie’s most astonishing scene is also its most horrific one— in which the slave owner Epps (played by Michael Fassbender) forces Northup to whip a young woman, Patsey (played by Lupita Nyong’o), and then to whip her even harder. Epps is passionately, erotically attracted to Patsey; he has raped her. Epps’ wife (played by Sarah Paulson) is violently jealous of her. It’s a scene of complex torment at many levels, including that of Epps himself, whose orders blend sadistic pleasure, emotional pain, his boundless desire, his guilt, and his revulsion both at his desire and at its object. The scene is so extreme, the physical and psychological violence is so hard to bear, that McQueen’s direction seems benumbed. Rather than relying on familiar tropes of cinematic chaos, he films with a calmly gliding camera that, here, doesn’t call to mind the infamous tracking shot of Kapò (which, Rivette charged, rhetorically stokes an emotional response that the action itself, simply presented, would suffice to evoke) but, rather, a terrorized director’s automatism— his loss of control. Filming that scene, McQueen seems not to know what to do at all; his technique seems to vanish into the ordinariness— the ordinary decency, outraged and horrified to the edge of madness— of his emotions.
In Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino presents the figure of the house slave (played by Samuel L. Jackson), as a traitor, a collaborator whose bloody comeuppance the director seems to applaud whoopingly— a point of view that reveals Tarantino’s terribly immature judgment of people in situations that he can only imagine in comic-book form. In 12 Years a Slave, McQueen offers a wise and empathetic view of the house slave, Mistress Shaw (played by Alfre Woodard), who has escaped from the slave owner’s most brutal treatment by becoming his mistress, and who, in the process, makes whatever use she can of her improved situation to help other slaves. McQueen’s compassionate and insightful perspective reminds me of the view offered by Lanzmann in his new film, The Last of the Unjust.” There, Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Judenaltester (Eldest of the Jews) of Theresienstadt— in effect, the Jew chosen by Nazi overlords to administer the concentration camp according to their orders— is presented not as a traitor or a collaborator, but as a tragic figure who took on the moral burden of his proximity to the Nazi bosses in order to do whatever he could to save as many deportees as possible.
Of course, for Lanzmann, the accused collaborator is the center of the film; for McQueen, she’s a peripheral character. And the two movies have no significant aesthetic similarity— Lanzmann is not a virtual presence in his film but, rather, an on-screen participant who assumes the moral burden of the historical subject. The differences between the films and their subjects make their point of congruence all the more noteworthy. For both directors, the personal engagement of empathy, the moral tuning of the inner ear to the secret messages of souls in despair, is a paramount artistic— and political— virtue. McQueen finds nothing banal about the evil of slavery, either.

Rico says that this Steve McQueen, the black director, is not that Steve McQueen, the dead white actor.