Every show of ReBirth of a Nation is a new live mix. So Sally and I saw different shows when we each saw the show earlier. What I saw and danced to at the Creative Commons Birthday was different from the Spoleto show that Sally saw and the show that we saw together with Tucker last night at Memorial Hall was different yet.
People seemed amazed that Spooky does a new live mix at every show, but then as a DJ he’s used to changing his show each time and to trying to read the audience.
This clip was not what we saw exactly but it does give you a flavor of how Spooky remixes the Griffith film. More music, sheet music, photo show, and an essay by Spooky about Rebirth can be found here.
Roger Ebert, in the best less than book length take on Birth, notes that Griffith himself cut the movie in many different ways over time and that the fragility of the film often resulted in prints of different lengths being shown each night. Ebert tells us, at the end of his article, that Griffith “once edited a version of the film that cut out all of the Klan material, but that is not the answer.”
Archive for September 24th, 2005