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12 Years A Slave Book Vs Movie Essay

Decent Essays

To study the slavery by 12 Years a Slave, which is a memoir of Solomon Northup, the book and the film version are great sources, so, which one is better for learning? We cannot deny that watching the movie 12 Years a Slave is way more readily than reading the whole book, because it portray in pictures and sounds, gives a clear image to audiences. Reading a book can have more imaginations, but a memoir does not need that much imagination since it purposes to tell a period of history. Therefore, if students did not read the book carefully, some historical details will missed and student , and it against the purpose of reading the book – study the history with details. Thus, watching the movie is much more readily. Does the movie portray the same …show more content…

The answer has no doubt, the book, because the book written in details of Solomon’s slaved life, and it has historical authority that the film does not have, despite some biased portrayal of the characters’ emotion. If we measure the film by the standard of the book in historical fidelity, how does the film rate? Is it portraying the history essentially accurately? To conclude the film, we could say it depict mostly the same as the book, rate a four out of five stars, because it do portray an substantially accurate history, performing how a decent black free man become a slave, suffering and surviving, and finally being rescued, although some of the processes has been skipped, like the things happened in Red River area. There are many historical subjects in book have been skipped because of the length restriction of the film, does that make this film’s portrayal became a history of distortion? To a certain extent, I think it does not, although there really are some discrepancies, some events had been ignored, some processes (torture scene) had been slightly changed, and some characters’ negative personalities and motions had been highlighted, the film still follows how the timeline goes. What we need to focused on 12 Years a Slave (book and film) is the timeless indictment of slavery in 19th century of America, or we could say the timeless indictment of colored discrimination in 19th century of

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