To create his film Rebirth of a Nation, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, remixed D.W. Griffith’s 1915 epic film The Birth of a Nation. His re-telling
of this overtly racist story depicted in the Reconstruction-era United
States hurtles Griffith’s images into the 21st century. The original film
was based on a novel and theater play by Thomas Dixon entitled The Clansman. By applying DJ technique to cinema, Miller’s new film parallels, deconstructs and remixes the original. He likes to think of it as “film as found object” in the same sense that artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol and David Hammons, among many others, have fostered creative investigations into the idea of found objects, cinema and “appropriation art.”