ARTSMONDAY: Spooky Rebirth Strikes Sanders

“It’s like writing history with lightning,” Woodrow Wilson said of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation that pays homage to the Ku Klux Klan, “and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. “DJ Spooky,” channeled lightning with a laptop before a sold-out crowd in Sanders Theatre Friday night. He edited Griffith’s silent epic—live—interspersing dance clips from choreographer Bill T. Jones, projecting the remixed footage onto a massive triptych backdrop, and all the while turning tables to produce a tuneful blues base.

The only audience member at Sanders who didn’t seem to appreciate Miller’s ingenuity was James Otis, Class of 1743, whose austere white marble bust stood just a few feet behind the artist. When Miller scrolled Wilson’s notorious quote across the Sanders stage, one could almost see the statuesque Otis shudder. After all, Otis was killed by a bolt from the heavens in 1783; the lightning metaphor might have struck too close to home for the august alum.

But for others in attendance, Wilson’s “lightning” quote could have applied to Miller’s masterpiece—except that the postmodernist deejay would likely object to the notion that “truth” can be objectively defined.

My only regret is that Miller refused to take any stance on the profound questions that his performance provoked. “I don’t want to be heavy-handed and say ‘this is good,’ ‘this is bad,’” Miller told an audience of a dozen or so students and community members in the basement of the Carpenter Center Saturday morning after the performance. “It’s a blur.”

Rebirth of a Nation, Miller explained, is the first installment of a trilogy in which he seeks to show that the nation-state is, at least in part, a cinematic creation. He has yet to begin work on the second installment, which will grapple with Leni Riefenstahl’s 1934 Nazi propaganda picture Triumph of the Will. The third part, he said, will most likely remix French filmmaker Abel Gance’s intensely patriotic Napoleon (1927).

Miller’s Rebirth opens with the artist flashing national insignias at a speed of 10 images per second—until the Jamaican banner becomes indistinguishable from the Confederate flag. Meanwhile, Miller plays Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock version of the “Star Spangled Banner,” which devolves the anthem into unrecognizable scratches of sound. Miller describes the montage as “a metaphor for what would happen if all these flags didn’t mean so much.”

Having reduced nationhood—or at least its emblematic expression—to a set of shapes, Miller assigns a geometric pattern to each of the characters in Birth, and then allows Griffith’s Birth to pick up the fragments of splintered national identity. At the climax of Griffith’s myth, veterans of the Union and the Confederacy realize that they share the common bond of an “Aryan birthright”—and they defend this birthright from a mob of marauding Negroes.

At several points, Miller cleverly appropriates Griffith’s footage. In one ballroom dancing scene, Miller sets the movements of Confederate soldiers and their fair-skinned Southern belles to a hip-hop rhythm. (The Confederates groove to the beat.)

But at other points, Miller leaves the Birth print surprisingly intact. In part, this was—as Miller conceded afterwards—because his trusty laptop crashed, forcing him to let Birth run uninterrupted while he hit control-alt-delete. Meanwhile, the 136 Harvard alumni who died fighting for the Union—and whose names are engraved inside Memorial Hall—might have been turning in their graves, as Griffith’s glorification of the Confederate “Lost Cause” played in its original form for three full minutes.

For those of us in the audience who had never seen Birth before, the technological malfunction strengthened the viewing experience: it gave us an unmediated glimpse at Griffith’s original.

But therein lies Miller’s predicament. Remixing in real-time, he can’t compete with the disturbing but undeniable brilliance of Griffith’s carefully constructed epic.

Miller seeks to forge a new national identity that moves beyond race. But his flag montage seems to deconstruct—and discard—the very notion of nationhood. At once, Miller proposes a rebirth of America, while at the same time, he suggests that national categories such as “America” are hopelessly artificial.

Griffith offers a romantic—though rabidly racist—vision of what it means to be an American; against this backdrop, Miller’s alternative of “panhumanism” is only vaguely defined.

Without a doubt, Rebirth of a Nation electrified the Sanders audience on Friday. What’s less clear is whether the lightning bolt came from Miller’s clever remix—or from the raw emotional power of Griffith’s original.

—Reviewer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.