12 Years a Slave and Marcel Proust's 'petit pan de mur jaune'

12 Years a Slave is a truly excoriating film: in the watching, in its unflinching indictment of white antebellum America, and quite literally, as whips savagely flay and slice open the naked backs of Solomon Northup and his fellow slaves.  Is it possible, though, to judge these films in the same way that we judge other works of art?

Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup

If put on the spot and asked to declare my favourite work of art (in any medium), without hesitation I plump for Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It is a vast, rich, rewarding read that proves a wonderful accompaniment to any relatively comfortable life. The things I love about it are many: it’s a bible for the flâneur; it contains long, beautiful, labyrinthine sentences that demand absolute concentration; and it teaches you how to look closely and intimately at art. Illustrating this latter point is a famous passage concerning the death of the ageing writer Bergotte. At an exhibition, whilst gazing at Vermeer’s View of Delft, Bergotte suddenly falls ill and dies.  However, before he expires, Bergotte has a sudden revelation about art. I'll quote in length – (it would be difficult to quote Proust in any other way):

“.... one of the critics having written somewhere that in Vermeer's View of Delft (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an Exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself.  Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. At the first few steps that he had to climb he was overcome by giddiness. He passed in front of several pictures and was struck by the stiffness and futility of so artificial a school, nothing of which equalled the fresh air and sunshine of a Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea.  At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else that he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic's article, he remarked for the first time some small figures in blue, that the ground was pink, and finally the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His giddiness increased; he fixed his eyes, like a child upon a yellow butterfly which it is trying to catch, upon the precious little patch of wall. "That is how I ought to have written," he said. "My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with several coats of paint, made my language exquisite in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.”

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft (circa 1660)

Gentileschi, Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting 1630s

Critics have ached over the tiny patch of yellow, suggesting around three possibilities in the painting for its location. Although it’s an interesting exercise to try and locate it (have a go) this somewhat misses the point. Notwithstanding Bergotte’s appropriation of it from another critic, the point of the petit pan de mur jaune is it’s subjectivity. It is the detail that has struck a particular individual in such a way that it has elevated the piece of art to a special place (you could argue genius) in that individual’s consciousness. Indeed, I have my own versions of the petit pan. The way that gravity and the tilt of the artist’s head causes a necklace to fall in Artimesia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting; Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s melancholic aside in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night – “I was adored once too” – that provides a temporary cessation to the comedy’s bullying and bawdry; or Van Morrison’s wistful laugh a few bars into ‘Slim Slow Slider’ that speaks ruefully of the end of an intense adolescent love affair. 

But how to seek out these ‘petit pans’ when watching a film as harrowing as 12 Years a Slave? To sit there, amidst the violence and the grotesque injustices - injustices seems too light a word - and to evaluate from an aesthetic point of view seems perverse. At times I had to look away from the brutality, fixing my eyes instead on fellow cinema goers or the auditorium’s upholstery.  And then at other times I did attempt to find temporary respite in trying to locate the director’s aesthetic impulses.  And in one of those moments I suddenly found myself focusing on a small, dark smudge that lay on the chin of Mistress Epps (Sarah Paulson) the particularly loathsome wife of a plantation owner. Hardly discernible, but clearly there and deliberate – not the careless, overlooked work of a make-up artist – it spoke to me of something real. Against the elegant white dress and the ‘civilised’ poise of the mistress of the plantation was this dirty mark. It spoke of a day to day existence outside of the film’s parameters, and therefore paradoxically, gave it an air of authenticity, emphasising that these were real people and that the story being told was not some gruesome fairy tale or caricature.  

Sarah Paulson as Mistress Epps

The philosopher Theodor Adorno remarked that ‘to write a poem after Auschwitz was barbaric’ - although, I should add, when placed back into context Adorno’s quote is more ambiguous and complicated than that. But even if we take that comment at face value, the response should be that there must be poetry after Auschwitz. There must be films about slavery. Horrific suffering and injustice must have some form of expression so that they are not forgotten.  And because we would prefer to gaze at a painting, or engage with a novel or a poem, or take in a film at the cinema, rather than be subjected to dry statistics and potted facts that seldom contain the human stories that are able to trigger empathy, art remains the essential medium for this expression. Yes, we may flinch or look away from what is presented to us. Or we may feel guilty at seeking aesthetic respite amidst great suffering and pain. But without these stories we would be in real danger of remaining ignorant of the barbaric atrocities that people are capable of committing. For choosing to tell Solomon Northup's story then, Steve McQueen deserves great praise. And for telling it in a way that does not waver from the visceral truth, and yet manages to uphold the highest aesthetic values, he deserves all the plaudits that are surely coming his way.