“Jezebel” does so in a way that is ultimately cowardly, not to say creepy. More than many films about American slavery-certainly more than “Gone With the Wind”-they engage with the poisoned intimacy in the relations between blacks and whites in the South. The movies bear watching together, and not just because they are set in the same state and years.

But the distance between Amy and Solomon is a measure of how radical, and powerful, “12 Years a Slave” is. The visitor might be a carpetbagger, a Union colonel, or a Philadelphia detective. Amy, like Northup, is the “visitor from the North,” an archetype in films about the South. In the movie “Jezebel,” Amy comes south because she has married Preston, a New Orleans banker who was once engaged to Julie (who is now deranged by jealousy). Solomon Northup was a New Yorker who ended up on a series of Louisiana plantations after being kidnapped in 1841. The mistress of the plantation looks at how her husband is watching Patsey, and then reaches for a heavy crystal decanter, which, with abrupt violence, she throws at Patsey, knocking her to the ground. Then Patsey, a young woman played by Lupita Nyong’o, raises and twirls her arm in a gesture whose vivacity could never be choreographed.

Northup, who plays the fiddle, might as well be Orpheus. They move like dancers in a dream, half ritual and half gloom. Edwin Epps, a planter, has dragged his slaves out of bed to make music and dance for him and his wife. There is a scene, similar but transformed, in “12 Years a Slave,” the new movie directed by Steve McQueen and based on the memoirs of Solomon Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Solomon the slave