Join us at the Lichtblick Kino at Kastanienallee 77 in Prenzlauer Berg on Monday, October 10, for a special screening of DJ Spooky’s REBIRTH OF A NATION, a remix of D.W. Griffith’s infamous 1915 film BIRTH OF A NATION (see below). The film begins at 9:00 pm, but don’t come at the last minute because the theater seats only 32 people. And, if you can, come early to discuss the up-coming election.
STARTING AT 7:00 pm, AVA will be offering urgent last-minute help for all those who have not yet registered to vote or who have not by then received their ballots. Alan Benson, our voter registrar, will be there to help with especially difficult cases.
Admission to see the film €6.50, reduced €5.50.
October’s Exblicks provides last chance voter registration (courtesy of American Voices Abroad Berlin), fine wine, tasty snacks and hopefully edifying conversation about the political future of the U.S. Or at least drown your sorrows with kindred spirits (no pun intended).
The get together is followed by a special screening of musician/filmmaker/cultural theorist DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation, a film project based on a remix of D.W. Griffith’s infamous 1915 film Birth of a Nation. Griffith’s movie established the standards of classical narrative cinema while presenting an assembly of hideously stereotypical depictions of African Americans.
The original film was based on a novel and theater play by Thomas Dixon entitled The Clansman, which propagated a founding myth of the Ku Klux Klan as “self-defense“ organization. Almost as if he were seeking atonement, Griffith subsequently directed such classic films and cinematic appeals for cultural understanding as Broken Blossoms and Intolerance. Yet Birth of a Nation confounds and disturbs to this day.
Essentially what DJ Spooky is doing is applying DJ technique to cinema in a way that parallels, deconstructs and remixes the original. DJSpooky 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.”
DJ Spooky’s musical score is performed by Kronos Quartet.
In cooperation with Exberliner magazine, American Voices Abroad Berlin, realeyz.de
