Rebirth of a Nation
Posted on June 22, 2009
Filed Under PEEP THIS!
Tonight, TRACE will celebrate the launch of our annual best-selling issue, Black Girls Rule!, featuring Dominican model Arlenis Sosa on the cover. Along with TRACE, DJ Spooky, aka Paul Miller, will be screening his remix of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation. TRACE sat down with DJ Spooky to gain some insight into cinematic remixing, and why he chose to tackle such a controversial film.
TRACE: What was your reaction when you first saw the original film “Birth of a Nation”? What inspired you to remix it?
DJ Spooky:The last 8 years were such a weird blip in history - false elections, false wars, media blackout on any relationship to reality (remember those “weapons of mass destruction” - why are we fighting two trillion dollar wars? Anyway, Birth of a Nation has a resonance with so much of what’s going on - we have a black president, we have occupied nations, we have crazy Republicans… the loops are pretty intense, and they’re utterly intertwined with our contemporary situation. I didn’t remix the film to make it nice and new - the idea was to dig into the DNA of film history and connect some of the dots. The myth of America, the myth of war, slavery, occupation, and how people define identity - dj culture has absorbed so much of what it means to relate to the rhythms that define modern life. I just wanted to flip the two together, and see what came out of the mix.
TRACE: How does remixing a film like “Birth of a Nation” allow you to expose the historical biases and racial propaganda of the 20th century? How do you relate this to present day American culture? (Political/racial/psychological/etc)
DJ Spooky: Looking back at the 20th century and the beginning of Pop culture, the main theme was the “minstrel show” - look at the biggest films of the era “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With The Wind” - they all were obsessed with race, class, and the changing operating system of what America represented: to itself. People loooked at Birth of a Nation like a mirror held up to reality. The film was viewed as a historical reality. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. America today still has so many issues to confront, but things evolve and change. Try telling that to Rush Limbaugh…
TRACE: Describe the technical process of remixing film and how it differs or is similar to the process of remixing music. Do you find one medium more powerful than the other?
DJ Spooky:When the film was presented at Paula Cooper Gallery, it was done as a kind of art installation. I wanted to figure out how to make it a living breathing document that reflected some of the major themes of contemporary art today - appropriation, collage, documenting everyday life and above all - plaigiarism. You can look at video artists like Doug Aitken, or African American video artists like Arthur Jafa, you can see the same dynamic. Even digital media artists like Cory Doctorow. Anyway, I want to push the collage aesthetic as much as possible. Alot of my influences come from early cinema like Dziga Vertov’s collage documents, cinema verite (keeping it real, hah!), or early African American film makers like Oscar Michaux. The vibe for the whole project is “director as Dj” and yeah, film and music as a medium, are more emotionally direct than alot of contemporary art, but there’s still an elusive quality that makes this project stick together. It’s hard to say which is stronger. It’s all technical…
TRACE: How does that technology fuel a new wave of control over how history is written/rewritten, altered, or represented?
DJ Spooky:Technology is the basic medium of everything in the 21st century, and basically we just need to accept that. Looking back at the 20th century the main thing that kept humanity from losing out completely to the forces that we unleashed on our selves (fascism, socialism, communism, racism etc) was the ability to channel how technology and expression. Can you imagine what the world would be like if we hadn’t broadcast Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech, or if people hadn’t been able to check out Mahatma Gandhi’s “Salt Satyagraha” marches, or the way Nelson Mandela and the ANC communicated a will towards a new South Africa? You have to always expect that people will take the tools provided and change them. That’s what this film project is about. I guess you could call it comparative myths of the near future, through the prism of the past.
For more information, check out Rebirth of a Nation
Photos courtesy of djspooky.com
Interview courtesy of Mikaela Gauer
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