Tribeca Film Festival

Saturday, May 5------Paul D. Miller (better known in hip-hop circles as DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) re-works, re-makes, and re-interprets  one of America's most controversial films, the D.W. Griffith-directed silent epic BIRTH OF A NATION. The film, which charts the rise of the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War, has been controversial since its release in 1916.....for showing the Klan as defenders of the white race and Anglo-Saxon civilization and portraying the newly freed black slaves (mainly white actors in blackface) as the villians of Reconstruction. Calling his multimedia show REBIRTH OF A NATION, DJ Spooky presents a visual and audio extravaganza, projecting the film on a triptych, using new visual material and presenting a re-worked score as performed by the Kronos Quartet. This uniquely visceral extravaganza's goal, according to the Spook, is to create a new narrative in response to fallacies that  were propagated by the original film. In Miller's own words: "BIRTH OF A NATION focuses on how America needed to create a fiction of  African-American culture in tune with the fabrication of 'whiteness' that  under-girded American thought throughout most of the last several centuries:  it floats out in the world of cinema as an enduring, albeit totally racist,  epic tale of an America that, in essence, never existed. The Ku Klux Klan still uses this film as a recruiting device and it's considered to be an  American 'cinema classic' despite the racist content." The newly minted REBIRTH, which is had its world premiere at the Winter Garden last evening and has a repeat performance tonight,  is a powerful expression in the evolution of art, cinema and activism.