It was interesting actually seeing a video of DJ Spooky's performance of Rebirth of a Nation after reading about it in Jason C. Apple's article "Re-mixed Histories." The differences between the description of the performance in the article and the actual video of the performance that I watched certainly emphasize Paul D. Miller's use of ephemerality and the repertoire in his performance that Apple discusses in the article; the first part of Rebirth, which Apple describe as a blindingly fast montage of different flags that increasingly becomes dominated by the Confederate flag, is missing in this version of the performance. Looking over a different version of Rebirth, too, allowed me to spot some scenes that changed between performances.
One main visual feature of Rebirth that seemed to remain consistent across the description of the film in Apple's article and different versions of the performance was the use of diagrams—what Apple describes as "circuit boards, maps, and floor plans" (46)—placed on top and embedded within the footage of the film. While Apple doesn't discuss the role of these diagrams in Rebirth too much, I think they play an interesting role within the piece by breaking down both the visually designed melodrama and racism of the original film that Michele Wallace describes in her article "The Good Lynching and 'The Birth of a Nation': Discourses and Aesthetics of Jim Crow," as well as the conflict between Griffith's efforts to present Birth of a Nation as impartial history while doing so via a heavily narrativized and dramatized film (which Apple also discusses in his article).
As for the visually engineered melodrama and racism, there are a few examples I could point to. In one scene in Rebirth, the hand of a newly freed black man (played by an actor in blackface) as he slips an extra vote into a ballot box is tracked by a diagram composed of rectilinear lines, highlighting the effort of the film to racistly depict "the undeserved and unearned prosperity of blacks during Reconstruction," as Wallace writes. In another scene where some of the main characters are holed up in the cabin of two Union vets and fighting off soldiers that are pursuing them, the diagrams reappear again to highlight the way in which the melodramatic acting, blocking, and poses within the scene are used to frame these characters—some of whom are former slave owners and current KKK collaborators—as dramatic heroes.
Simultaneously, the diagrams that weave their way into the Rebirth also bring attention to that conflict between the supposed impartial historicism of Birth of a Nation and its obvious narrativization. During several scenes that feature depictions of actual historical events or figures—like the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, or a scene where Lincoln and the film's Senator Stoneman discuss the future of the South following the Civil War—the diagrams interject into the film again. In these instances, the diagrams seem to play a dual role. On the one hand, the "rational" or "scientific" aesthetics of these diagrams perhaps reflect the intention of Griffith to present Birth, the film, as a true and unimpeachable account of history (thereby justifying the racism and Lost Cause myth in the film as matter-of-fact). On the other hand, though, the engineered diagrams remind us of the engineering of the film itself, of the personal choices made in framing, plot, acting, lighting, and every other aspect of this movie that were designed to sell a very particular, very racist perspective on the Reconstruction era, just as Griffith's (or, in the case of Rebirth, Miller's) signed and initialed interstitials remind us of the authorship that dominates the respective films/performances, as Apple points out.
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