assignment2
e201611
la_heine_2017.pptxLa Haine
“We don’t exist, nobody sees us” A youth from a banlieue outside of Paris
Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz.
Title derives from a line spoken by one of the protagonists, Hubert: "La haine attire la haine!", "hatred breeds hatred."
Setting
The French bainlieue (specifically, Seine- Saint- Denis, 93)
Located outside the city limits of Paris.
Bainlieus (ZUP - zone à urbaniser en priorité) constructed by French as “affordable” housing” for immigrant population.
Create socio-economic and socio-spatial inequities between Paris and its suburbs.
For centuries, Europe has sent its citizens throughout the world as explorers, conquerors, imperialists, civilization builders, etc.
Things have now changed for Europe. For the first time in centuries, people are struggling to enter and stay in Europe to find new lives
While the pattern may seem similar to the immigration patterns of the US, the history of Europe and its sense of nationalism make it markedly different.
La Haine brings the issue of immigration to the forefront.
The film centers its problematic not on ethnic differences, but rather on the socio-spatial inequities between Paris and its suburbs.
The film is also an allegory for the postcolonial
present.
“Bainlieue” are the homes of outcast minorities whom reside in the French metropolis, in which the youth are forced into the life of violence and crime from their lack of a national identity.
The Protagonists
Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson present their definition of youth culture “as symbolic or ritualistic attempts to resist the power of bourgeois hegemony by consciously adopting behavior that appears threatening to the establishment” (1993).
Film follows the lives of three young men and their time spent in a banlieue over the span of twenty-four hours.
The main characters, Vinz, (Jewish),Said, (Arabic), and Hubert, (of West African descent), have grown up in the banlieue, where the racist and oppressive police force have caused hostility in the lives of the French youth.
La Haine, opens with the narrator telling a joke about a guy who is falling from a tall building and repeats to himself, "So far so good, so far so good" as he passes each floor.
The metaphor refers to France's unwillingness to see the problems of its suburban ghettos. Kassovitz chooses to emphasize the issue of ethnic immigrants in France, who do not conform to the archetypical ideal of the French citizen, making it the major subject of the film.
This theme essentially criticizes the country's failure to integrate its minorities.
France has an “economic-cultural rift, that has increasingly developed in France between those who have and those who do not, which all too frequently also means those who belong to and practice the dominant culture and those who not” (West 1).
From the lack of national identity, the boys of the film seem to feel they have no purpose in life; they are not striving to become educated in order to leave the ghetto or working hard to climb their way out of the bottom. They feel trapped in the life they live.
Said, introduced opposite a group of policeman. The next shot shows Said behind one of the police vans writing his name in graffiti.
Said’s actions show typical banlieue teenager would go about dealing with the police’s presence in their community. Said has snuck behind the policemen to vandalize their van, rather than to act out aggressively to the police he is being surreptitious.
Vinz introduced dancing in a dark basement, which we will later learn is a symbol of his happiness for finding the lost police gun.
The next shot shows Vinz lying on his bed sleeping. The previous shot was clearly a dream and the camera zooms in on a ring displaying the letters in his name.
Vinz is the character who feels the need to avenge the brutal attack on the Arabic citizen of the banlieue. Vinz is not of Arabic descent but he feels the need to even the score of death of one of his fellow banlieue residents.
Vinz acts like the tough guy but Vinz ends up setting the captured skinhead attacker free.
Hubert, who is introduced in his gym, which has just been terrorized by the riots the night before.
Hubert, also a boxer, is greatly upset that his gym has been destroyed; Hubert is the intellectual member of the trio.
Hubert is the one member of the group that is trying his hardest to get out of the banlieue, but the pressures from the banlieue seem to be holding him back.
All three, although of different ethnicities, have common bond of being hated.
Emphasizes the possibility of subversion and transgression, as narratives oscillate between spaces of state-regulated, highly controlled landscapes to abandoned warehouses and vast rooftops where the protagonists – at least momentarily – are able transgress the boundaries of state surveillance to cultivate spaces of their own accord.
speaks to both the suburbanization of poverty and racialization of the suburbs in France through a postmodern fragmentary aesthetic to ‘shock’ its viewers into insight.
The juxtaposition of images, sounds, and camera angles, alongside the narrative itself evince veiled relations between space and time, prodding its audience to question received attitudes and perceptions, or the various levels of mediation that have enabled the words”banlieue youth” to become synonymous with crime, poverty and arrested social development.
The film explicitly confronts shifting social relations shaping the boundaries between the centre and periphery defining an emergent neo-racism in France.
The youth have become “symptoms” of a nation in crisis, not only out of the forces of racialization, but also because of their “cultural otherness”:marginalized as residents of a Parisian banlieue.
Film involves a day in the life of these characters, including their prolonged conversations, interactions and exposure to racism, classism and what it's like to be minorities in modern (at the time) day Paris. They meet at the same places, hang out at the same locations with people they relate and generally just sit around. They then go home, wake up and do the same thing again.
This time we find them about to attempt their same routine, but a day after a riot destroyed their neighborhood.
Despite the streets and businesses being destroyed, they attempt to stay to their routine. But it's not an average day, and is instead a day that will later set their world on fire due to the ticking time bomb that is the main character's dilemma, which spills over into the other characters' dilemma as well.
A perfect example of this is the single shot of the long conversation that one of the characters later felt was a pointless story because it didn't end the way he expected,
Old man later comes in and tells a story the characters find completely random and useless. This could be the old man's routine, but who knows. He leaves the characters confused, and somehow stands out among their surrounding madness.
At the end, nobody laughs, and instead the jewish character expresses he's heard the joke before, but it was with a Rabbi. This illustrates how their average days and attempts to entertain themselves have become so mundane that even jokes involving their own culture is no longer offensive or worth caring about. The film is structured to allow viewer to experience how the characters feel with their surroundings.
Story also that illustrates dangers of pride. He talks about how the guy's pants keep falling down as he chases the train and has to choose between being seen naked and getting back on board. The man ends up choosing to deal with his pants and therefore is left behind to die of cold or starvation.
This mirrors the characters well, since they seem to take offense and balk at anything that doesn't fit into their view of life.
The cow and the old man each represent something different, but also tie into the randomness of the character's day. On an average day, the characters would face the dilemma of having a gun, similar to on an average day you wouldn't see a cow wondering the streets.
Cow is possibly a reference to the police, or more specifically to an alien or occupying police force. 'Mort aux vaches' which basically means 'death to the cops'. Vache is also the French word for 'cow'.
Possible that the cow refers to the police, and in bringing to mind that specific phrase 'mort aux vaches' it refers specifically to an occupying force which is fundamentally hostile to the characters.
Art of good intentions gone awry.
Immigrants participate in their own demise.
High jobless rates
Delinquency
Frustration
Racial and social conflict.
major problems of unemployment, social exclusion, racial conflict, (sub)urban decay, criminality and violence confronting immigrants.
negative portrayal of the police who, with the exception of one officer of North African descent, are represented as violent, racist and uncomprehending.
sympathetic, perhaps indulgent, representation of an excluded and multi-ethnic suburban youth.
Issues of citizenship, immigration, migration and ‘foreigness’ are often imbued with the socio-cultural constructions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ by a particular society.
Societies often scapegoat immigrants for a number of societal ills unrelated to the migrant populations in a specific geographical areas, issues such as unemployment and economic recession. Also, differences (of language, race, religion) between the migrant populations and the mainstream citizens exacerbate cultural misunderstanding.
Protagonists
: Three “bainlieusards:”
Vinz
Hubert
Said
The Police
French Society
struggle between unflinching realism and filmic self-consciousnes;.
Film of great sociological importance but also a vehicle with important cultural implications;
presents a day in the life of three youths in an identified Parisian slum (bainlieu, ZUP).
Begins with black-and-white documentary footage of real riots and starts, as a result, with a feel of historical authenticity.
Black and white footage and film gives fiction of La Haine the authority of history.
references to color throughout picture that jolt the viewer and make aware of its absence. Vinz, talking about the riots of the previous night, says, “It was war against the pigs, in living color!”
If color is a sign of life, then the decision to shoot La Haine in black-and-white separates it from reality.
In a shop, buying peppers for his grandma, Vinz does not have enough money for the green ones, only the red, which she hates;
Kassovitz creates dream-like world in which normal social and physical rules do not apply, in which the Eiffel Tower will turn off at a command.
Hubert’s boxing gym has been trashed and left in pieces early in the film; there’s even a car that’s been deserted inside. Saïd wonders, “How’d the car get in here? The doorway’s not big enough.”
Vinz’s repeated references and visions of a cow border on the surreal.
Viewer sees his fantasies enacted on screen throughout the film, the image of a cow walking down a street lends no certainty to his claims to truth. The question of the nature of the cow – real animal or phantom – remains unanswered.
The cinematography strengthens the dream-like (or nightmarish) aesthetic of the surreal:
Hubert is first presented to the viewer he is shirtless in his gym, punching a lone black boxing bag that hangs from the ceiling, surrounded by the debris of the recent destruction
La Haine is inextricably rooted in the unique environment of the banlieues and a reading of the film as a universal allegory is consistently frustrated (though never totally shut off).
Posters, appearing all over the city and apparently advertising optimistic outward reaching (they say “the world is yours”), in fact reinforce the walls that surround the characters.
Saïd spray paints one of these images, changing the tag line to “the world is ours”; it feels less like an affirmation of the poster’s sentiment and instead a grim realization that his world, the banlieue, is inescapable.
Note the aphoristic anecdote (“How you fall doesn’t matter: it’s how you land”) is put into the mouth of Hubert, the only character of the trio that openly expresses a desire to escape (“I have to get out; I have to leave this place”).
La Haine breeds tension:
struggle between apparent realism and filmic self-consciousness;
narrative hints at a universal application, while frustrating a reading that moves away from the specifics of the banlieue and, most sadly, the characters’ pretensions.
Tensions are unresolved and it is fitting that there is no real sense of conclusion:
as the viewer is only allowed to hear the shot, when Hubert and the policeman are at gunof social stagnation: the narrative does not conclude because the situation continues (effectively) unchanged.
Hubert’s first words echoed at the end: “How you fall doesn’t matter: it’s how you land.”
Cyclic pattern this repetition suggests is paralleled in the microcosm of a single line, again from Hubert. When arguing with Vinz, he warns him simply that “hate breeds hate.”
The desolation of the projects is obvious throughout the film as they make their way to Hubert's gym - burnt-out cars, boarded-up windows and no prospects.
The sense of pressure, hopelessness and despair endemic in the projects permeate every minute of the film, yet the resilience of the human spirit shines through.
La Haine
La Haine
La Haine was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995 to great critical acclaim.
Matthew Kassovitz was awarded Best Director and five times as many copies of the film
were produced as would normally have been the case, as people flocked to the cinema to
see it in their thousands. And yet the film is shot in black and white on an ugly housing
estate in Paris with a cast of unknown (as was) actors. In addition, the subject matter of the
film was not exactly entertainment – a day in the life of three unemployed youths building
anger and resentment as they wait for their friend to die.
Despite all this, audiences loved it and ten years later a special anniversary edition has
been released at the cinema.
Discussion questions
Which of the following words or phrases would you use to describe La Haine?
Bleak
Pessimistic
Exciting
Action-packed
Tense
Hopeless
Menacing
Heroic
Sexist
Enjoyable
Innovative
Discussion Questions
In what ways does Kassovitz’s characterization of the Arab, the Jew, and the African in his film La Haine (Hate) resist racist stereotypes? How, if at all, does it repeat racist stereotypes? Explain.
Why does he cast the three protagonists as an Arab, a Jew, and an African? How does this emphasize the cultural, political and social conflicts surrounding a nation and its immigrants?
How are racial stereotypes configured in the film? How are ‘good’ and ‘evil’ portrayed in the film? Who is ‘good’? Who is ‘evil’? How are these categories culturally determined?
Which of the following terms would you use to associate with the film? Explain your reasons:
La Haine
La Haine was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995 to great critical acclaim.
Matthew Kassovitz was awarded Best Director and five times as many copies of the film
were produced as would normally have been the case, as people flocked to the cinema to
see it in their thousands. And yet the film is shot in black and white on an ugly housing
estate in Paris with a cast of unknown (as was) actors. In addition, the subject matter of the
film was not exactly entertainment – a day in the life of three unemployed youths building
anger and resentment as they wait for their friend to die.
Despite all this, audiences loved it and ten years later a special anniversary edition has
been released at the cinema.
■
Which of the following words or phrases would you use to describe La Haine?
bleak pessimistic exciting
action-packed real tense
hopeless menacing heroic
sexist enjoyable innovative
Discussion Questions
How are these three main characters juxtaposed to the institutional force of the French police?
How are they juxtaposed to the white teens who are members of a Neo-Nazi gang? How does the film highlight the cultural differences in the ways that ‘French’ teen gangs are treated and ‘non-French’ gangs?
What role does the lack of a national identity on the part of the characters play in the film?
In one scene, Vinz yells,”At least I know who I am and where I am from.” Does Vinz really know who he is and where he is from?
Why does Kassovitz use the time frame of 24 hours? What makes that day different for the three? Why the ticking clock?
