The Birth of a Nation

About a year ago I saw the trailer for The Birth of a Nation and I was, for whatever reason, thoroughly unimpressed with the pacing and structure of it. The music doesn’t make you scared or anxious or provide any of the emotional oomph that’s required of a film about slavery. The trailer certainly has some lovely cinematography and what not, but there’s no energy to the way the images are presented. It’s not telling a story. And for whatever reason that annoyed me, all that potential that’s just left there out in the open.

So! One night I couldn’t sleep and I decided to make a remix, mostly as a challenge to try and fix the pacing but also to convince myself to make weird and wild things again. So after downloading the movie and picking one of my favorite songs at the time, I stitched the scenes back together and made the following trailer:

It’s certainly not perfect, and it’s rather clunky in parts, but there’s a few mashups of image and audio that I still love here — when the man lifts his hat and the piano stumbles into the scene for a moment, especially.

Anyway, it’s fun to do things that are just for yourself, without any hope of trying to making a dime off of it, or boosting your career, or grabbing attention. A thing can be, like, just a thing. You know? Yeah. I miss that.