![]() ![]() ![]() But the distance between Amy and Solomon is a measure of how radical, and powerful, “12 Years a Slave” is. The visitor might be a carpetbagger, a Union colonel, or a Philadelphia detective. Amy, like Northup, is the “visitor from the North,” an archetype in films about the South. In the movie “Jezebel,” Amy comes south because she has married Preston, a New Orleans banker who was once engaged to Julie (who is now deranged by jealousy). ![]() Solomon Northup was a New Yorker who ended up on a series of Louisiana plantations after being kidnapped in 1841. The mistress of the plantation looks at how her husband is watching Patsey, and then reaches for a heavy crystal decanter, which, with abrupt violence, she throws at Patsey, knocking her to the ground. Then Patsey, a young woman played by Lupita Nyong’o, raises and twirls her arm in a gesture whose vivacity could never be choreographed. Northup, who plays the fiddle, might as well be Orpheus. They move like dancers in a dream, half ritual and half gloom. Edwin Epps, a planter, has dragged his slaves out of bed to make music and dance for him and his wife. There is a scene, similar but transformed, in “12 Years a Slave,” the new movie directed by Steve McQueen and based on the memoirs of Solomon Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. ![]()
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