re: Another 12 years a slave thread...

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and that there were better books out there on the subject matter (although these don't have as compelling a story and are more an amalgam of the multitudes of experiences in the antebellum south.)

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You've read a whole lot of autobiographical works from former slaves? Hell, I cant even think of another one. Up From Slavery doesn't fit the bill, nor do any of Frederick Douglas' writings, as he was more of a polemicist. That's a bizarre criticism.

What made the movie great? Well, it's on a subject that honestly hasn't been mined for material all that much. There's very few fictional works about American slavery from the slave's point of view. Roots is the best known, and even that moves past slavery for the second half of the series. Movies like Django Unchained are as much about slavery as Inglorious Basterds was about WWII, which is to say, not really at all. Even movies like Mandingo are clearly an alternate, fictional reality. A film like Lincoln, while about outlawing slavery, is not about slavery, nor does it spend much time depicting it. Probably the most praised film on the subject, Amistad, is really a courtroom drama.

But what makes the movie great is its use of music, sound, and in particular, silence. There's not a word spoken for the first several minutes, and its quite effective. The hanging scene is also entirely wordless, or at least the aftermath is, and the camera lingers on in silence, with only the chirping of cicadas as the score.

Beautiful camera work and cinematography, but really, this movie was a masterwork in sound.