NICK STOUT | Photographs and Other Observations

the Oscar for Best Picture.  It would have won, no doubt, even without the votes from at least two judges who declined to watch the film.  According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, these two members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences did not want to be upset by the movie’s violence, but they selected it anyway because of its “social relevance.”   

One wonders about the contemporary social relevance of plantation slavery in a society that abolished it 150 years ago.   America has many social problems, racial prejudice prominent among them, but nobody buys and sells slaves anymore.   

In that vein, I don’t entirely agree with Eugene Robinson, who wrote in the Washington Post that we’ve never fully investigated the horrors of American slavery, “which means we’ve never come to terms with them, which means we’ve never been able to get beyond them.”  Does he mean we need to document each individual injustice?  Unlike those who carried out the Holocaust, or who supervised the gulags and the killing fields, no one alive today bears any responsibility for American slavery.   

Robinson does, however, go on to make a significant point.   “Commerce in cotton picked by slaves was so important to New York’s growth as a financial center,” he noted, “that the mayor, Fernando Wood, wanted the city to secede during the Civil War in order to continue doing business with the Confederacy.”  

Robinson might have had racism in mind, but the larger implication is that human freedom is still too easily compromised to protect money, power and privilege, or in the dubious name of state security.  It is not difficult to find relevancy to our own world in that observation.

As for the film, I was not as disenchanted as my daughter, who bemoaned the superfluity of violence.  Don’t waste your money, she advised. (What’s to gain in beating a dead slave?)  I bought a ticket anyway and came away satisfied.  The sad story of Solomon Northup was new to me, and the brutality credible.  To the director's credit, we were spared the phoniness that can so ruin otherwise good films.  (I keep thinking of that ridiculous airport-chase scene in Argo.) 

A final word on the Oscars: Woody Allen, who consistently refuses to participate, argues that such awards are meaningless in a craft as subjective as filmmaking.  He’s right.  It’s rather like asking:  Who was the better artist, Cézanne or Picasso?  The painter Robert Henri wrote nearly a century ago, in the context of the salons of his day: “It’s not that the juries do not mean well, or at least think they mean well, but it is simply that art cannot be measured.”   Accordingly, Hollywood judges ought not presume themselves competent to designate a film as “best;” at most they should be stating a "favorite" or, for some, what might have been their favorite had they bothered to see it.