For whom does the bell of 'Mafifa' toll?
By ANTONIO ENRIQUE GONZÁLEZ ROJAS -November 20th, 2023
RIALTA
As she confesses at the beginning of her second feature film, 'Mafifa' (2021), Daniela Muñoz Barroso suffers from a "progressive bilateral hearing loss" that prevents her from perceiving the high-pitched sounds of the world, just like those emanating from the "bells" in the traditional congas of the city of Santiago de Cuba, whose piercing sounds tame and channel the drums, their low rumbles, into unspecified but continuous paths. For in the conga only movement matters, the forward motion. It is a perpetuum mobile of sound and fury that travels towards itself in the most absolute and uroboric self-sufficiency.
Gladys Esther Linares, better known as Mafifa, is considered by devotees of the Santiago conga as the "major bell ringer”: an object of worship, reverence, and myth since her sudden death in 1980, just on the verge of that year's carnivals, long before the filmmaker herself was born.
It belongs to a time before Daniela's time. It is a presence in fugue toward the past that leaves a trace still perceptible but in inevitable disintegration, just like the few blurred and brittle photos that some witnesses extract from old albums and precarious personal archives. The pupils that saw her alive are faded and tarnished. The newspapers that refer something of her life and death break at the slightest touch.
The material drifts and sinks into the waters of oblivion. The sounds created by 'Mafifa' on the congas were never recorded, and their echoes are fading in the memories of those who once heard them. Perhaps, more than metallic clinks, they remember the impression it left on them. Sound turned into feeling, an operation of pure emotional alchemy. 'Mafifa' is also a sensation, a state of being that makes the eyes of the interviewees shine before Muñoz Barroso's camera and a force that his most faithful disciple invoked when he felt himself weakening in the middle of a conga. It is a powerful and invigorating cry. A dense absence. An element integrated into the air breathed by all those who live for and by the conga.
Mafifa is always a sharp chime away from Daniela, who always strives to overcome this biologically impossible border in order to discover and understand the woman of flesh and blood who reigned over a place almost exclusively for men. An unrepeatable priestess who left scattered traces of random coherence in a world no longer able to listen to her.
The film's portrait of the bell ringer is as complex as fragmentary, dislocated, and truncated. It blends and completes with the one that, simultaneously, Daniela Muñoz Barroso weaves of herself as an equally fragmentary subject, in struggle with the perceptive deficiencies that condition her dialogue with the world and challenge her to reimagine the silenced through a confessional gaze, which in turn incites a photography of close-ups, detailed shots, narrow framing, and unstable fixity. The young filmmaker departs significantly from her previous documentary, 'The Parrandas' (2017), in which, to investigate another of Cuba's most deeply rooted festive traditions, the Parrandas of Remedios -in the center of the archipelago-, she opted for a much more functional, expository photography, which veiled and protected the intimate vulnerabilities that become essential in 'Mafifa'.
As she suspects that the entire world is even more elusive for her, Muñoz Barroso clings to details, expands and enlarges them in each frame, concentrating on reading them as possible omens, symbols that enclose universal truths, condensed maps of the past and the future, quick channels to access the Universe. From lip-reader -to guess the words that wade through her auditory field-, she becomes a decipherer of faces, gestural calligraphy, and bodily signs. Her sight is trained in decoding subtleties.
The faces, the bodies, and the spaces, always captured in very close frames, invite us to look as Daniela Muñoz Barroso looks, to understand her gaze and her idea of the world, and at the same time, they invite us to explore the lightest and most secret plots of reality, to train our sensibility, to transcend surfaces, to suppress our physical senses to give way to extrasensory perception, to the third eye.
When she is presented with the first portrait of the legendary bell-ringer, Muñoz Barroso casts her lens on the fuzzy black and white photograph -probably a copy of a copy or an enlargement of a copy of a small photo-, perhaps with the instinctive impulse to read her lips, to perceive the silent call that Mafifa seems about to make from the past. We then witness an almost mystical moment where the whole discourse of the film is sublimated.
Mafifa is also one of these channels of mysterious nature and inapprehensible symbolic richness through which the film seeks to access a third area much more closely related to 'The Parrandas': the anthropological inquiry into the Santiago conga and its paroxysmal, cathartic, tragic strata, its effects on those individuals who, according to certain traditionalist perspectives, whether complacent or contemptuous, tend to dilute into a depersonalized mass, into the amorphous revelry with a hive-like attitude, into a collective and univocal subject.
In her (healthily) stubborn struggle against general shots, which for her end up representing a lack of communication and unintelligibility, Daniela Muñoz Barroso dedicates herself to breaking down a conga into particular faces, looking into the eyes, reading facial maps, and revealing possible secrets. Nicolás Guillén Landrián (1963's 'In an Old Neighborhood'; 1965's 'The Dance'), and his thoughtful deconstructions/cartographies of the most humble Cuban groups, gravitates over her as another tutelary spirit, apart from Mafifa. The strident female face in which the title shot of 'Memories of Underdevelopment' (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968) is frozen, seems about to appear at any moment. And where is Mafifa? Where is Daniela?
As part of the IV INSTAR Film Festival program, ‘Mafifa’ will be available for Cuban audiences on Tuesday, December 5, and Sunday, December 10, at 7:00 p.m., on the online platform Festhome. The film will also be screened on Friday, December 8, at the Zumzeig Cinecooperativa in Barcelona, Spain, while on Saturday, December 9, it is scheduled to be screened at the Centro Cultural General San Martín in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
You can read the original note here