FictionThatMatters.org

Rebirth of a Nation
Written, Directed and Produced by Paul D. Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
Starz Media/Anchor Bay Films, 2008. 100 minutes.
Screening at the MOMA from June-22, 2008

It started in Jersey

I first listened to DJ Spooky during a hot, humid July in New Jersey in 1996. The summer felt like it would last forever, and his new album Songs of a Dead Dreamer offered a needed escape. The disc meandered along with spacey sounds, reaching driving rhythmic heights with the astral tracks Galactic Funk and The Terran Invasion of Alpha Cantauri Year 2794. I thought I had found a fellow escapist. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. When I opened the liner notes I found a short essay by DJ Spooky that was steeped in cultural theory. Most of his words flew over my head, but I recognized that the album was not about escaping but participating — at least at a theoretical level. Maybe DJ Spooky didn’t want to surf the rings of Saturn as I had hoped.

Blasting Off

Since the release of that album, DJ Spooky, né Paul Miller, has plunged deeply into hip-hop, produced films, and explored the art of graphic design. He is now a spokesman for ‘remix’ culture, which attempts to celebrate the proliferation of digital media by mashing-it-up. He has sampled everything from Bob Marley tracks to the flow of ice crystals across Antarctica. Not all of his work is successful, but most of it brings a few a-ha moments of enlightened discovery.

Birth of a Nation

DW Griffith’s The Birth of the Nation was the first blockbuster film of the 20th century, packing theatres across the U.S. The 180 minute feature follows an affluent white family in a small town in the South through the period of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Although assaulted by national politics, the family reunites to stave off the true dark terror — the rise of black political power. The silent film contains numerous fight scenes, battle recreations, and an abundance of melodramatic acting. The narrative moves smoothly, even by contemporary standards.

Propaganda

For anyone with a basic knowledge of history and a conscience, The Birth of a Nation is an extremely disturbing film to watch today. The film purposefully distorts American history so as to glorify the racist legacy of the Ku Klux Klan, which played a hand in over 3,500 lynchings across the South after the close of the Civil War. Black characters are often white actors covered with soot, and the mixed race characters are white actors covered with what looks like slime. The blacks contribute nothing but mayhem and looting, while the whites impart dignity and order to society. It is a powerful propaganda film.

Some of these stereotypes still linger today. The Birth of a Nation reinforces the myth that all black men want to ravish white women, that slave masters were kindly to their chattel, and that mixed race blacks wish to dominate whites and blacks alike.

The Rebirth

Paul Miller first remixed The Birth of a Nation in 2004. His creation, The Rebirth of a Nation, then toured the world with Miller providing live accompaniment. He revisited the work in 2008 and embedded the soundtrack in the film so that it can now be screened on its own. The new soundtrack still maintains an organic feel, however, because the award-winning Kronos Quartet performs Miller’s original score. The music rarely delves directly into hip-hop, instead relying on the wider, more open aural space that characterized Spooky’s earlier albums.

At its best, the remix recalls the magic of The Dark Side of the Moon when it is synched to The Wizard of Oz, in which pivotal onscreen moments are heightened with the electronic beats. At its worst, the music stresses irrelevant moments in the narrative, dragging the film out needlessly when nothing really happens onscreen.

Unlike Miller’s TERRA NOVA: Sinfonia Antarctica, in which an insistent, minimalistic string score dominates the images of icebergs, Rebirth is enjoyable because of its graphic innovations. Miller has clearly been working hard to perfect his graphic design skills and it shows. He is friends with the artist Shepard Fairey, who is now best known for the iconic stylized image of Obama. Fairey’s influence is apparent. Throughout Rebirth, Miller overlays sightlines upon the images to create simple, geometric frames. These frames draw your attention to key points in the action, but also playfully distract your eye from other loci of action. At times, the entire frame is frozen and the camera subverts the focus of the original camera to highlight images in the background. When these graphic elements combine with the music, Miller achieves something special — one of those a-ha moments that send shivers down your spine.

Logorrhea

My biggest gripe with this film is the narration. Although the narrator possesses a mellifluous voice (the narrator is not Miller, who confesses that he sounds too nerdy to narrate) the narration thrusts itself into the film much too often. It is an attempt to highlight the propaganda, but the overall result is that the film feels too didactic. There is certainly a need to confront the propaganda, but I believe this would have been better served with Miller’s graphic design techniques rather than a professorial tone. Miller has explained that the narrator track can be turned off on the DVD, but for those of us who were trapped in the theatre, the only recourse was to chew your gum really loudly.

Another setback is that Miller tries to connect the stereotypes of Rebirth with the issues of today: Iraq, Afghanistan and what not. This babble of words is overdone and too vaguely presented for any useful discussion.

A final small, but very annoying point is the fact that Miller inserts his own name around every text box in the silent film. While somewhat quirky, the gesture borders on self-absorption. The first two minutes of the film (and the narration) already inform us that Miller put the work together. It’s not as if we will have forgotten after every moment of dialogue during the film.

Mind on fire

Miller belongs in the same echelon of explosive creativity as a David Byrne or an Andre 3000, although he lacks the readily digestible sound that would allow him to pack a LiveNation stadium full of rabid fans. For now, his work is too bookish to reach everyone.

This point was underscored during his discussion with Trace magazine after the film. Miller speaks eloquently, making rapid associations between widely disparate fields. He credits his manner of thinking to DJ culture, in which anything and everything is up for grabs, and the only criteria is that the material works.

But this is also Miller’s problem. While his rapid-fire associations explain the motivation between his creative decisions, they do not necessarily translate into his work. He may be good at telling us what we’re supposed to see, but we don’t always see it. This was evident during his screening of TERRA NOVA: Sinfonia Antarctica. In a room full of Nobel prize winners and climate change experts, Miller dazzled the audience with tales of his creative journey. Yet the onscreen product was disappointing, with way too much textual narration and an overabundance of statistics cluttering the screen. His mash-up CDs, on the other hand, benefit from his short attention span, moving nimbly between beats and melodies. He hasn’t yet been able to channel his DJ spirit into other media in a sustained fashion.

I still think Miller is one of the most exciting creative artists in America today. His mind is on fire. But his efforts may bypass the mainstream until he harnesses that flame. That’s fine for me. I’ll keep on truckin’ to see what he burns through next.

–Deji Olukotun

All images credited to DJ Spooky. Rebirth of a Nation, 2008. Courtesy Anchor Bay Films/Starz Media