Solomon Northup and Django Freeman: Subverting Traditional Images of Slavery

What can figures like Solomon Northup and Django Freeman teach the world today? Why have two renowned directors chosen to tell their stories? Such questions will be the guiding thread of this thesis, with the aim of understanding how slavery is portrayed in each film and by each director. Delving into the core of what will be the main theme of this dissertation, a preliminary observation must be made. The black body has always been depicted in a certain way, with certain peculiar characteristics, from the privileged point of view of the white Western man. This has meant, for years, for centuries, the perpetration of stereotypes that overshadowed the very idea of the possibility, for a black man, to even have intelligence. Since the origins of cinema, the portrayal of slaves has followed this same path, showing black individuals as contented servants working in the plantations. Despite the gradual progresses in portraying black people’s agency and active pursuit of emancipation, it is clearly evident that the prevailing narrative, the one still circulating nowadays, still tends to associate their liberation with white figures like President Lincoln. Starting from the comparison between McQueen’s film and Tarantino’s, this work will try to highlight whether and how the two main characters respond to these stereotypes, confirming, problematizing or reversing them, with the precise aim of doing justice to the past, to “neglected materials” (Bernier 5).