KHAVN DE LA CRUZ is one of the Philippines’ most prolific young independent filmmakers, and is considered to be the torchbearer of the Digital Revolution in the country.

He already has four full-length features to his credit: "Pugot" (Headless) (2002), "Greaseman" (2001), "The Twelve" (2000), all shot in digital; an 8mm video chronicle "Kamias: Memory of Forgetting" (1996-2002) plus countless short films which include "Amen", described as a 'Brown Comedy', a Filipino parody of the black comedy.

It is difficult to pin Khavn dela Cruz’s films to a particular genre or style, although he has bagged a Tokyo Video Festival prize and several honors in the experimental and feature categories of the alternative film awards of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), and has recently been invited as a juror in the Jeonju International Film Festival (Korea).

The term "experimental" itself is a nebulous one. Yet it is a parameter in which Khavn’s imagination comfortably finds full roaming.

His is a sensibility fashioned by spontaneity, books of poetry and philosophy, the language of the music video, and the ‘round-the-clock screenings of art films (a mind-boggling variety that runs the gamut from B-movies to European classics to the latest dogme titles; from Evil Dead 2 to Andrei Rublev to Touch of Evil to Mifune). Khavn never attended formal film school although he considers as mentor the acclaimed independent filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik (Perfumed Nightmare).

Khavn dela Cruz's work is characterized by dry, absurdist humor, a cerebral tone, the hidden mystico/philosophical frameworks, the original music soundtracks (cognizant of the fact that film is truly sight and sound), restless visually abstract juxtapositions, homestyle special effects, the long, meandering, at times disjointed narrative line that likes to take its time, the dead-pan dialogues with self-conscious/reflective philosophical smatterings.

Dela Cruz is also an award-winning poet, a musician-composer, a masterful keyboardist/pianist--essentially disciplines that inevitably find their way into his unique cinematic statements.

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PUGOT (Headless) (2002)

Given the standards of The Twelve and Greaseman, Pugot (Headless) emerges to be Khavn’s most "conventional" film, in comparison to his other works. Pugot shows a Khavn seemingly more in control of his cinematic kinetics.

This is a more compact, slightly straightforward story of a relationship ending in macabre tragedy. But here we still do not see a linear narration. Instead, the film alternates between two parallel situations: a room where we witness the freely improvised dialogue between the lead character and his wife; then the streets at the break of morning, where Khavn’s camera follows the image of a dejected, desultory man, long hair cascading down his face and blood flowing down his jeans. In the darkly moody opening credits, we see a man holding a knife. It is implied that he castrated himself, and the act of emasculation somewhat becomes a central metaphor. When he wanders aimlessly through the empty avenues, we hear the minimal piece of musical scoring atmospheric electric guitar riffing courtesy of legendary Pinoy rock axeman Jun Lopito.

 

THE TWELVE (2000)

The Twelve is his first major full-length effort and is a rather ambitious undertaking after a breathless series of short works. The number "12" holds a significance for Khavn, who is an avowed disciple of numerology, twelve being the base number of time and space in ancient astronomy and astrology, representing cosmic organization.

It is Beckett-ian in its basic premise (The director describes it as "Waiting for Godot" x 6): Twelve guys in barong tagalog are waiting for someone and are whiling away the time through rounds and rounds of liquor, their dialogue flowing from philosophically profound to pedestrian silliness to pure poetry especially towards the end. It is implied that the man they are waiting for is of cosmic, religious, earth-shaking import.

The narrative is interrupted by a series of what can be considered as 12 music videos: pure collision of image and song (original pop-rock ditties featuring Khavn himself on vocals and piano, with a backup band). Kind of like a retooled Waiting for Godot with MTV interruptions.

The Twelve is not for the impatient: it is an exercise in sensory abandon, economy and brevity not exactly Khavn’s favorite concepts here. There are gems of images: The opening sequence is pure, quietly unexpected strangeness: in a jeepney ride, passengers pay the driver objects like necklaces, guitar, shoes for their fare. The last passenger is a young man who tries to pay with real money. The driver refuses. The passenger cries and drips tears onto the palms of the contented driver.

GREASEMAN (2001)

Here, the filmmaker takes the experimental spirit further. The storyline is less complicated that that of The Twelve, but here he completely takes out dialogue and instead relies on pure stream-of-consciousness spoken word narrative, flowing freely with the rhythms of a live band churning out similarly improvised free rock-jazz-pop-ethno-avant garde musical textures.

The title "Greaseman" is the literal English equivalent of the "taong grasa", the markedly disheveled, filthy gutter dweller who roams the streets of Manila in rags and mud-caked hair. The greaseman is someone who has lost all hopes as well as his sanity, looking more like a character from the Paleolithic age rather than a beggar in a modern city. He is a complete picture of despair: drinking and bathing in clogged canals, rummaging through trash
cans, and muttering loudly to himself.

Greaseman follows the parallel stories of a taong grasa (played by veteran stage/movie actor Lou Veloso) and a condo-dwelling, car-driving yuppie (the clean-cut mainstream film actor/director/sometime heartthrob Eric Quizon). They are worlds apart, but a series of events allows their paths to cross. The yuppie accidentally runs over the taong grasa, drives him over to the hospital for medical treatment, and then to his condo unit, in an unexplained fit of humane kindness. However, the greaseman overpowers the yuppie, dresses up in office clothes, and takes over his life. There is a reversal of conditions.

Such material may turn into socio-political commentary in the hands of other directors with less whimsical imaginations. As a manifesto for whatever social and philosophical persuasion, Greaseman remains hazily floating in an abstract cloud. The film actually derives its expressive power from the interaction of the different art forms involved.

Khavn takes all the time in the world to tell his story, letting his camera flow organically to the point of taxing the viewer’s patience. One marks the oblique camera angles, the somber dark-red tones of the photography, and the interesting atmospheric counterpoint provided by the sound. Khavn himself does the voice-over, in a half-recited-half-sung manner. The vocals actually flow in two tracks, one in English and the other in Filipino. The words/phrases used only suggest mood instead of literally annotating the story.

Then there are the startlingly hallucinatory visual intrusions: line art animation by Khavn’s perennial partner-in-crime film editor/filmmaker Gatla Gunawin and surreal, kaleidoscopic imagery by the Anino Shadowplay Collective. Both the animation and the shadowplay weave in and out of the narrative intermittently, supplying a different sort of tension to the film.

 

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