The Cure is in The Pain: Cohesive Disorder 2

(2014)

Over the coming weeks, I will be writing about some films which I enjoyed at the festival Instants Vidéo in October 2023.

In Cohesive Disorder 2, a 4 minute film by Payam Mofidi, a woman tries to recite a sentence but is continually interrupted by drops of liquid falling into her eyes, so she never manages to finish. The water falls from a napkin held in the air above her by a pair of hands coming from offscreen, so the irritating interruptions seem to be a deliberate, orchestrated attempt to thwart her recitation. The music, a sporadic jangle of dissonant tones, seems to thwart her as well, with its irritating clamor. The video has the stuttering motion of a low frame rate and the images have a patchy black and white look, as if the film were constructed from a series of low quality photocopies of still pictures. Occasionally, the drops of liquid and the pain in her eye are highlighted with red marker, emphasizing the feeling that the drops are really painful, so much so that they make it nearly impossible for her to concentrate on her task.

As far as I can piece together from her verbal fragments, the sentence she is trying to say is something like “The end is lost to the one who reaches the end.” This self-referential pronouncement gives a fascinating context to the film, open to multiple interpretations.

Certainly, anyone can relate to the experience of trying to accomplish something, but operating in an environment with so many irritants that it is almost impossible to function; this must be a universal modern experience. Since she never manages to reach the end of her sentence, it is apparent that the end is indeed “lost” to her. The very deliberateness of placing the wet napkin above her and squeezing it can be read many ways: is a malevolent society trying to suppress her thinking? Is the universe structured, either randomly or as part of a grand spiritual purpose, to throw constant irritation in our way? Or perhaps she has set up the whole situation herself, as a kind of esoteric experiment or exploration?

What do these “interruptions” of liquid, and of eye pain, do to her consciousness? And by extension, what do they to us, the viewers, by thwarting our expectation of seeing films in which the narrative moves forward, at least as far as a single sentence goes? Pain always serves a function: it pulls your consciousness into your body, into a problem that needs more awareness. In this case, it is yanking the woman out of her intention, her determination to say he whole line, and into her physical experience of the present moment. Is it possible that the role of the constant irritation and pain that make up much of life is to pull us back into the present, even if it is incredibly annoying to have to learn this lesson again and again? Is this the cohesion, the underlying purpose, in the disorder of trying to navigate through a world that thwarts us at every step?

Cohesive Disorder 2 yanks us away from our preconceived notions of what “watching a film” is, and in so doing, it plunges us directly into the sensory bath of immediate visual and sound sensations. This may be, at times, irritating to watch, but it is also a strange gift, an irritation that blooms into awareness. As Rumi has it, “the cure for the pain is in the pain.”

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