Itscoolimgood (2010)
By Stanya Kahn
is one of three films from her first body of solo video works. The most narrative of the three, It's Cool, I'm Good continues Kahn's longstanding exploration of the blurred lines between fiction and document, performance and being, humor and distress, the scripted and the improvised. Commandeering a rotating staff of nurses with wit and belligerence, a severely injured protagonist (Kahn) moves through the city, hospice, and wilderness, seducing, harassing and charming caretakers into doubling as video witnesses. Memory and time have been destabilized by trauma. Mirroring economic collapse, urban tension and ecological demise as contexts for contemporary stress, the “patient” embodies damage and resilience with a relentless albeit morbid stream of jokes and facts. With a 22-track surround-sound audio score and over 20 locations featured, creates a visceral cinematic space in which place and action, landscape and soundscape operate literally and metaphorically, signaling a tenuous relationship between experiences of trauma and moments of agency. Paralleling the ways in which jokes simultaneously compress and expand meaning, here living and and naming collapse into each other, in a…
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