The Oscar-nominated film ‘12 years a slave’ stands as an epitome amongst all the period films which have their central theme based on the plight of slaves in America. This review aims at assessing the various aspects of the film which made it a huge success and a matter of adulation for the global cinema lovers.
The content of the film is extremely well crafted via using an autobiographical account which makes it perfectly competent for its plot(Cameron and Belau 227). The most interesting part of the film is that the story focuses on the most traumatic and evaded part of slavery and presents it within the realm of reality, like no other movie of this genre (Cameron and Belau 227).
In terms of the form, the cinematography in the film is exquisite as most of the scenes are shot for an extended period of time and using a single camera for emphasizing the viewer’s perspective. The shots are deliberately held at a particular scene for longer durations so that the characters have full liberty to express themselves across the chosen terrain. The cinematography by Sean Bobbit has worked very hard to add emotional value to the classic efforts of actors and provided them a natural visual angle to express themselves in front of the camera.
The film ensures that the night sequences are well shot with the dim lighting as the period films lack the privilege of using the street lights or flood lights to illuminate the shot. Editing is meticulously executed to ensure that the natural variation in the screenplay and the plot are always significant and long shots are deliberately kept as such to add realism to the film.
Film review: Watermelon woman
The Watermelon woman is a unique film as it uses the mock-documentary genre and blends the two unusual aspects of lesbianism and interracial love to create a very peculiar story line. The film has an extremely controversial subject but it is so well tackled by Cheryl Dunye (director and writer) that she develops an entirely humorous angle towards looking at it.
In terms of the content, the film’s story involves a heavily eccentric comparison of the unmediated lesbian body of the character which inspires the protagonist Cheryl to compare it with that of her own lesbian form of existence in the world (Winkour 233). Cheryl tries to recreate the character of Mammy but also likes to maintain the similarity with her existing form as a lesbian entity.
A striking aspect of the film is that the film never tries to show an evolutionary difference between the earlier version of the lesbian body (Mammy) with the contemporary avatar. A humorously interesting aspect of the film was in the fact that Cheryl’s family and friend disapprove her relation with a white partner as they considered only a black female to be justified for their definition of being a lesbian ‘sister’.
In terms of the form, cinematography by Michelle Crenshaw is excellent when he integrates the vintage clips and black-and–white clips with the contemporary scenes and they look very genuine. Most of the scenes are shot in open using the natural daylight and the film-making scenes have their own share of humor to add to the comic sense of the film. The editing is lucid where the retrospective imagination of Cheryl are depicted and rest of the film has very steady transition from one shot to another.
Works Cited
Cameron, Ed and Belau, Linda. "Under the Floorboards of this Nation’: Trauma Representation and the Stain of History in 12 Years a Slave". Movies in the Age of Obama: The Era of Post-Racial and Neo-Racist Cinema. Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. 227-230. Print.
Winkour, Mark. " Body and Soul: Identifying (with) the black female body in Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman".Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-representations by African American Women. Rutgers University Press, 2001. 231-236. Print.
