Word: birthed
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...election parallels are just one of many links from the present to the past that Miller plays up during each of his performances. Miller focuses on and exposes Griffith’s wildly inaccurate and offensive portrayal of blacks and women in The Birth of a Nation. As each show is remixed live, each performance is unique, and on any given night, he might emphasize one of several themes: the stereotyping of women and African-Americans, the disenfranchisement of black voters, or the film’s graphic violence...
Miller explains this connection between The Birth of a Nation and Summers’ infamous statements about the “innate differences” between the sexes: “[I]t’s about clichéd perceptions of people. A lot of us operate under assumptions—about behavior, intelligence, etc., etc.—the culture of the clich?...
...Birth of a Nation’s] main element, because it’s a silent film, is hyperbolic; the reality, of course, is much more complex,” says Miller. “I am intrigued how cinema is used to reduce complex issues into cliché soundbites, how it acts as propaganda for a very simple vision of America...
According to Miller, this reexamination of The Birth of a Nation is important because “Film is our global vocabulary. And it’s a language that cuts across all cultures…America is a culture of amnesia, and to me, a lot of issues pop up precisely because of that; the more we forget history, the more it seems to come back and haunt...
...these vaults contains the cleanest prints of The Birth of a Nation. Because the HFA has a policy of not allowing film prints to be copied or loaned, Miller had to work on site...