Word: millerism
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...