Purchase at Amazon

DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation at the Herodian Theater, Acropolis, Athens Greece as a part of the Hellinic Festival of Athens. 5/24/05 more>


After more than fifty shows around the world, from Lincoln Center in New York, to Theatre Chatelet in Paris, to the Herod Atticus Amphitheater at the base of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, and festivals ranging from Australia and New Zealand to Louisville Kentucky and The Tribeca Film Festival, DJ Spooky brings his Rebirth of a Nation to DVD, courtesy of Starz Media and Anchor Bay Films, the folks who bring you The Simpsons and King of the Hill.

DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation is a film project based on a remix of D.W. Griffith’s infamous 1915 film Birth of a Nation. The original film was based on a novel and theater play by Thomas Dixon entitled The Clansman – essentially what DJ Spooky is doing is applying dj technique to cinema in a way that parallels, deconstructs and remixes the original.

DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation has been touring for several years and has drawn acclaim around the world. From the Herod Atticus Theater at the base of the Acropolis in Greece, to the London IMAX – Europe’s largest movie screen – DJ Spooky has presented the remix as an engagement with film, music, and contemporary art. 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, amongst many others, have fostered creative investigations into the idea of found objects, cinema, and “appropriation art.”

“Silent film scores were grandiloquent, meant to heighten what we saw on screen. Mr. Miller’s score, by contrast, deflects our responses, then alters them. A hip-hop drum beat pulses. (It sounds African and urban American.) A wash of industrial sound is joined by bells and cymbals; a dissonant violin; blues fragments. These are the sounds of history and racial complexity that Griffith tried to suppress.”
– Margo Jefferson, New York Times, July 8, 2005

“Arguably no one is more responsible for propagating and embodying the idea of the deejay as “artist” than DJ Spooky, whose ambitious, elaborate, often hypnotic soundscapes have been notable as much for their eclectic imagination as for their post-modern intellectualism.”
– Chicago Tribune

“This man is as brainy as a Mensa meeting, sharp as Zorro’s sword, funny as Falstaff. He is Einstein with a better haircut, a streetwise black Tolstoy, a revved-up renaissance man for the digital age, obsessed with art, information and digital technology.”
-Sunday Star Times – Aukland, NZ

// Photo Gallery: Summer Art Gatherings With DJ Spooky, Yinka Shonibare, Ryan McGinness, & More! September 09


Above: Confederate Generals, Confederate Surrender
Left: President Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, John Wilkes Booth, General Grant

djspooky.com

To top