These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us

13 min / SD / 2010

Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis escorts her favorite son on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi.

“These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us” is an appropriation-based work whose heavily processed imagery and sounds are derived from over a dozen sources, forging a hypnotic, heartfelt and darkly comic look at popular media’s obsession with of Ancient Egypt.  Made in the year between the respective deaths of Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor, the film centers around a maternal relationship enacted across Jackson’s Egyptian-themed 1993 “Remember the Time” music video, and Taylor’s iconic title role in the 1963 epic "Cleopatra".  As such, the film ruminates on the public consumption of celebrity life and death, and the shifting concepts of legacy and afterlife in the digital age.