birth of the nation project"This is the whole point of art: to confront the heartbreak of this world without the reassuring promise of repair." finishes Steve Almond his critical review of Jonathan Safran Foer very hype book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It was just the contrary he found in this book: "The book is ultimately a wish fantasy borne of the sorrows of 9/11. It peddles the seductive notion that our best response to those attacks need be no more mature than a childish wish that evil be banished from our magic kingdom."
For Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky the question is not to turn away our perception (as Benigni did with his child in his film La vita é bella crossing a heap of corpses in the concentration camp) but "to go through to simply to create a sense of order." That's what he writes in his notes for "Rebirth of a Nation" - remix of D.W. Griffith's 1912 film "Birth of a Nation."
Or, how to re-acquire a peception and language that were distorted by others (i.e. The Ku Klux Klan)?
The answer of DJ Spooky: "Sight and sound, sign and signification: the travel at this point becomes mental, and as with Griffith's hyper dense technically prescient intercuts, it's all about how you play with the variables that creates the artpiece. If you play, you get something out of the experience. If you don't, like Griffith - the medium becomes a reinforcement of what's already there, and or as one critic, Iris Barry said a long time ago of Griffith's Intolerance: history itself seems to pour like a cataract across the screen ... "

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