Discussed in this essay:

12 Years a Slave, directed by Steve McQueen. Fox Searchlight Pictures. 134 minutes.

“Someone must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” So begins one of the most emblematic novels of the twentieth century and so, more or less, begins the most generally honored motion picture of 2013: 12 Years a Slave. Directed by the forty-four-year-old British filmmaker and video artist Steve McQueen from a screenplay by the American novelist John Ridley, itself based on an 1853 account of the same title, 12 Years a Slave…