Mafifa
By Pablo Gamba – december 12th, 2023
LOS EXPERIMENTOS – BLOG DE CINE
The winning film of the INSTAR Festival, 'Mafifa', premiered in 2021 at IDFA in Amsterdam, screened at the Havana Film Festival in 2022, and won Best Documentary Feature at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. Daniela Muñoz Barroso attempts to create a portrait of the title character, a woman with a mysterious life who came to play the " macho bell" in the conga of Santiago de Cuba. The singularity is the subjectivity of Gladys Linares Acuña's search, following the trail of her record in the official memory and the memories of those who knew her in a sensory cinema marked by a limitation of the senses. It thus reflects the progressive hearing loss of the filmmaker, who could no longer hear Mafifa's instrument.
From the beginning as a road movie on the bus trip to Santiago, the documentary immerses the viewers in its sensory experience. It does so not only with the soundtrack but also with a camera that expresses the subjectivity of the filmmaker's character. This is achieved through detail shots, camera movements, and, in particular, the privileged attention paid to the characters' mouths. It mirrors the experience of the woman who reads the lips of those who speak with her. It also reflects the experience of a woman who perceives her presence in a place by sight and touch, in contact with everything that surrounds her, but, at the same time, at a distance because she does not hear certain sounds.
This, however, has the limitation of a film that does not present itself as an experimental documentary. From the beginning, there is also a counterpoint between the subjective sound and the extradiegetic narrating voice, in which the filmmaker's character is shown as she is by how we, who do not have hearing loss, hear her. Her way of speaking is borderline unintelligible at the beginning to draw attention to this but becomes more diaphanous throughout the film. It is worth noting the courage of Muñoz Barroso to show in on, off, and over her voice as it is, making it clear that understanding what she says only requires a little more attention.
In the auditory and visual planes, there is also a back and forth of this internal ocularization and auricularization, following the terminology of Gaudreault and Jost, to zero degrees in both cases. The opposite of the subjective is in the extradiegetic voice and, visually, in the aerial planes of the conga moving through the streets, in which the perspective is that of a "mega-narrator “, according to these same authors.
The film also stands out for the parallelism between the progressive loss of hearing, which leads the filmmaker-narrator to appeal to her memory of the sounds she can no longer hear, and the story of the investigation to assemble the portrait of Mafifa, with a tour of the place where she lived, documents, and testimonies. It is evident that the characters never knew, told, or could tell the whole truth about her as if society had become a little blind and mute about the way of being and living of a woman who defied sexism in music and her personal life.
In this sense, the search for Mafifa is also Daniela Muñoz Barroso's search for herself, another woman at odds with her environment, not only because of her hearing condition but also as an independent filmmaker in Cuba. Just as the film makes the proximity-distance of hearing loss strongly felt at the beginning, it returns to the same at the end, with the story of the ascent to a mountain, where the filmmaker's character finds a place where she can feel in harmony with silence. Thus, the documentary emphasizes the limitation of the documentarian’s encounters with the characters, whom she always perceives as from a world apart. It is a problematization that is almost essential in today's ethnographic cinema.
This reflexive aspect of 'Mafifa' extends to its construction of the others, who are always characters in a film of this type. Afro-Cuban culture and its tensions with what Paul Schroeder identifies as the hegemonic "socialist modernity" in Cuba, a project of European origin that does not cease to reproduce the colonial relationship, although its aspirations are different. Nor has socialism been successful in overcoming traditional inequalities, such as those of women in relation to men, or sexism. These are problems that the critical filmmakers of ICAIC's official cinema harshly encountered, as evidenced by masterpieces such as 'One Way or Another' (1974), by Sara Gómez.
It should be noted, therefore, that the ascent to the peace of the mountain does not constitute an escapist response or anything of the sort in 'Mafifa'. On the contrary, from this awareness of her difference with the characters and the filmmaker's dissonance with her world, the film plunges into the neo-baroque question, also pointed out by Schroeder, of the tensions between socialist modernity and an Afro-Cuban culture that has been modernized by the revolution, but also by its capacity to survive in tension with it or in resistance, as Bolívar Echeverría would say. Gender also comes into play, the rebelliousness of women from diverse cultures and social conditions against male hegemony, and even the problematic notion of "disability", in the way Muñoz Barroso challenges the stereotype.
This opens another door to the identification of the filmmaker and the viewers with the characters, no longer as "people" in the official way this is understood. Muñoz Barroso perceives, in the dance and the drum and bell tolls, an encounter of Afro-Cuban bodies with themselves in socialist Cuba. It is a way of saying that Gladys Linares was the woman she wanted to be and that her countrymen called her Mafifa when she danced and played the bell very loudly. It entails the recognition in the dancers of an African identity that resists a colonizing modernity in these movements, just as Mafifa resisted sexism. There is a part of the film where rain and fire come into play in relation to this, which opens the viewers' imagination to another way for these people to be in the world and to relate to its elements.
But the question remains whether Daniela Muñoz Barroso, the filmmaker, and we, the audience, are condemned to remain at the other pole of this tension, that of socialist modernity or "liberal modernity", also identified by Schroeder and which is colonialist by definition, as opposed to the modern people who resist. The question arises from the "progress" to which ethnographic documentary and art cinema are linked as a spectacle for the enjoyment of an enlightened elite.
The answer could be that no, we can somehow place ourselves on the other side of these tensions. In Mafifa's subjective attempt to immerse us in the human stream of the conga, we perceive the violence with which the police act to keep it within the limits of "order," as if fearing that resistance might spill over into revolt or rebellion. We vicariously feel a terrible echo of the whip and club treatment given to the slaves, as if we too were being controlled by the agents' violence. And this is not merely imaginary. It would really be in the face of such a common enemy that we could all find ourselves, despite our differences, in a people without quotation marks.
You can read the original note here