Vital Signs (1991) dir. Barbara Hammer

In “Vital Signs” (1991), Barbara Hammer demonstratively transforms the horror of death into its opposite. She tenderly cares for a human skeleton, feeding it, dressing and caressing it, taking it for walks in the dark cabaret of an intimate relationship beyond death. She confronts pain and fear rather than repressing them. “Vital Signs“, 1991, is a multi-media collage film/video that attempts to challenge some Western constructions of death as horrible and fearful by reversing this ideology. Instead of fear or aversion, death, in the form of a skeleton, is embraced, fed, clothed, walked with and made love to. Vital Signs is a sign of the end of unitary construction, a hint of the breaking up of ideologies, the questioning of systems of representation both in the ethereal world of ideas and the mechanical and digital devices with which media makers maneuver.