DJ Spooky brings his mixing skills to the movies and live-edits the pioneering American film The Birth of a Nation. By Andrea Yu

Don’t let his stage name fool you – Paul D Miller is more than just a disc jockey. Author, film score composer and music producer would probably be a more fitting job title for DJ Spooky. And, with his latest production in Hong Kong he can now add something along the lines of ‘live film editor’ to that list. After being commissioned by New York’s Lincoln Center Festival in 2004 and screening around the world (including at the Acropolis in Athens and the London IMAX, which is Europe’s largest movie screen), Miller’s Rebirth of a Nation makes its way to the Hong Kong Arts Centre this fortnight.

“The whole idea is to apply DJ techniques to cinema,” Miller says, explaining the concept behind Rebirth. Using an iPad application he developed, Miller will mix and edit the iconic silent film The Birth of a Nation in front of a live audience, while a string quartet from Hong Kong University performs the score he composed.

The original DW Griffith film was made in 1915 and it’s a hotbed of political content. Despite the war scenes being incredibly groundbreaking for cinema, the movie has since been labelled racist and xenophobic in its depiction of American society. The Ku Klux Klan, for instance, effectively ‘liberate’ post-Civil War America from black people. “It shows what happens if a black person is elected in the highest office of a country,” says Miller, who regards the film as the ‘DNA of American cinema’. “It was the first film to show terrorism.”

Much like a DJ digging classic albums out of his record bag, Miller treats Birth like a dance track mix – speeding up some clips, slowing others down. At times, the clips are arranged in non-linear fashion, compared to the original film, but Miller’s editing still tells a story. “The sampling, layering, they’re all just different forms of editing,” he says. Cinema may not be an obvious medium for this type of editing, but Miller gives us a good example. “If you look at Apocalypse Now, that’s one film that samples The Birth of a Nation. There’s one famous scene where they play Wagner [Ride of the Valkyries] from speakers in a helicopter.”

A more recent application can be found in Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming film Twixt. “You can control different versions of the film with your iPad,” Miller explains. Coppola hopes to tour Twixt before the film’s opening, delivering montage-like edits on the fly with musical collaborator Dan Deacon tweaking the soundtrack and Coppola himself narrating live.

Coppola encourages the concept of ‘director as DJ’, which is a motto Miller himself has adopted for his Rebirth of a Nation project. Eight years on, after the project’s launch in 2004, the topics it and the original The Birth of a Nation address are still very resonant today. “Fast forward to 2011 with Obama as president… [and] the US has now occupied Iraq and Afghanistan,” Miller says.

But can a project with such a heavy foundation in American politics find an audience in Hong Kong? We have no Obama or Ku Klux Klan, but Miller says our local film history gives us credibility. “With film directors like Wong Kar Wai coming out of Hong Kong, there is an audience that enjoys complex theory applied to cinema,” he says.

Despite this being the Asian premiere of Rebirth of a Nation, Miller has spent time in Hong Kong before and even speaks of making a film here one day. “I love the way the city reflects the complexity of how mixed the colonial Asian scene is,” he says.

During his visit to Hong Kong, Miller will also be launching his most recent written work – The Book of Ice – which is about his time spent in Antarctica and the changes he witnessed on the uninhabited, ungoverned continent. So while we have the chance to witness his mastery of the written word, his string compositions and movie editing skills in Hong Kong, ironically, the last thing we’ll see DJ Spooky do is DJ – in the traditional sense, at least.

Rebirth of a Nation HKAC Sat 15
The Book of Ice, book launch and workshop - XXX Thu 13