There are few sights more pleasant to the eye,” wrote Solomon Northup, “than a wide cotton field when it is in bloom. It presents an appearance of purity, like an immaculate expanse of light, newly-fallen snow.” For Quentin Tarantino, such a beguiling simulation of chastity, of endless untroubled whiteness, could merit only one response: blood must be spilt on it. Practically the only scene in which cotton figures in 2012’s Django Unchained comes when an overseer, galloping across a blooming field, receives a rifle shot to the torso. The newly fallen snow of cotton gleams pink with fresh blood.

Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, based closely on Solomon Northup’s 1853 narrative of his kidnapping in Washington, DC, and enslavement in Louisiana, paints a different picture of the southern agricultural system at work. Make no mistake: McQueen’s camera is not immune to the power of natural splendor and human gore, or their centrality to the visual world of antebellum slavery. But as its opening scene makes clear, 12 Years a Slave puts both beauty and blood in a wholly different context. A group of roughly attired black slaves stand in the foreground, dwarfed by the lush green sugarcane around them. An overseer barks out a few crude instructions, and the cutting gang proceeds to hack the tall cane into stalks of suitable size for grinding in the sugar-house. Agricultural plenty serves commercial profit; coerced labor transforms organic material into moveable capital.

Django Unchained, with its grand-manor staircases and gilded plantation parlors, reminded viewers in its flamboyant way that antebellum slavery was a system of terror and deprivation that flourished amid a world of abundance. McQueen does Tarantino one better in showing how slavery was above all a system of exploitation — not primarily sexual or sadistic, but economic — and that it was this exploitation that created that abundance in the first place.