Word: griffithã
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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...
...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...
...those of us in the audience who had never seen Birth before, the technological malfunction strengthened the viewing experience: it gave us an unmediated glimpse at Griffith??s original...
...therein lies Miller’s predicament. Remixing in real-time, he can’t compete with the disturbing but undeniable brilliance of Griffith??s carefully constructed epic...