Khavn De La Cruz is an artist. Or at least he matches my imagination of someone who would be defined as such by people eating petits fours. A socially acceptable artist. He seems a bit marginal, but still approachable (I have never met him, just my pure fantasy and prejudice at work here). He is a filmmaker, actor, musician, writer, poet. Besides being varied in the art forms, he is also very productive on the filmmaking side. To this day, he has more than 50 credits on IMDB, more than a hundred shorts and more than thirty-five features.
His second feature, “THE TWELVE | This is not a film”, has a title that is actually quite telling: The number reminds of the Twelve Apostles and hints us as to the latent religious theme of the movie. “This is not a film” hints us as to the question the movie asks: what is a film? Far from me the idea to write an essay about it and to answer that complex and legitimate interrogation, I'll stick to the Cambridge Dictionary definition for now and for the sake of this article. A film can then be defined as “a series of moving pictures, usually shown in a cinema or on television and often telling a story”.
“THE TWELVE” matches that definition: we have moving pictures. Moreover, there is a story.
The film is made up of 12 ‘shorts' where the camera follows characters: the passenger, the pop star, the coward, the gardener, the video clerk, the warrior, the addict, the teacher, the beautician, the handsome, the fugitive, the hermit. Each of these shorts not only explores different characters, but they mostly explore different camera angles, colors, editing, lenses, etc.
Between each of these short films, there is the ‘main story'. Compared to the other twelve shorts within the film, that story has a cinematographic coherence, character coherence, and chronological time frame. It tells the story of friends who are waiting for someone they never met (again, the religious/ spiritual side being explored). It's New Year Eve. They wait, drink, laugh, talk about life, sleep, smoke, etc. It is well executed in that dialogues remind you of summer nights with friends, talking about the meaning of life until dawn. This brings an ‘organic-ness' and ‘fake reality-ness' to the film, although the 4th wall is sometimes broken.
This feature might not fulfill the purely entertaining role cinema sometimes has (although, some find “Waiting for Godot” extremely diverting) but it is really interesting. I wouldn't really see it being screened at Odeon, but it would be perfect in a museum, and/or followed by a debate. And I certainly do believe that people studying filmmaking should watch it. It allows a debate on what films are, but also allows you to think of the conventional ways of filming and editing. And identifying all the processes used in the different shorts are quite an exercise in itself. If I were a film professor (which I am not- far from it), I would give a ‘THE TWELVE challenge ‘to my students: creating a story intersected with shorts that each have their own clear visual identity.
In conclusion, “THE TWELVE | This is not a film” is probably not what you are looking for when wanting to clear your head, but it is worth watching if you feel like watching an (almost) essay on film and filmmaking.
