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DJ SPOOKY
"REBIRTH OF A NATION"
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The Birth of Nation altered not just film history but American history and the way Americans have thought about their history. D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film tells a myth of the idyllic ante-bellum South, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction in which the bid to establish a "black empire" was averted by the efforts of a mystical brotherhood of white knights called the Ku Klux Klan — the heroes of The Birth of a Nation. Few American films — few, at least, meant for a wide public — have gone so far in glorifying racist terror and the disenfranchisement of black people. But countless films — including some of the best known — have built on one part or another of the mythical and cinematic foundation laid by Griffith. Last Friday night at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, in a Harvard Office for the Arts presentation, DJ Spooky dismantled this foundation in a triple-screen "remix" called "Rebirth of a Nation." The middle screen played re-edited and digitally altered scenes from Griffith’s film, its narrative truncated but legible. The left and right screens played, in unison, a more free-associative reworking of the same material. Near the end of the show, the three screens reached unanimity during Griffith’s scene of a siege on a farmhouse, but Spooky made sure that his remixing dissipated the narrative force of the Klan’s ride to the rescue. The film was often heavily filtered and layered with graphics (grids, maps, blueprints, outlines that isolated bodies and gestures). A striking effect repeated half the original image as a mirror of itself, so that, for example, the white forearm of an abolitionist protruded, in duplicate, out of a fold in mid frame. A blurred and distorted shot of a female dancer (borrowed from a Bill T. Jones video) lifting her arms till they’re perpendicular to her body became one of the most insistent recurrent images, a human question mark raised against Griffith’s epic confidence. In his score, DJ Spooky concentrated on texture and ambiguity while avoiding some of the more obvious possibilities of ironic counterpoint. The only sustained use of a human voice was a passage using Robert Johnson’s "Phonograph Blues," with thick reverb making the lyrics indiscernible. Hip-hop and funk rhythms predominated. Mixed in among light flurries of free-jazz strings were the stately, cyclical themes of a simulated string orchestra. The music played as big a role as the video editing in reconfiguring Griffith’s patterns, unbinding his imagery from the narrative, and turning The Birth of a Nation into a haunted club mix of volatile history.
BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
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