La Haine
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
3. Primary Texts: Film
Matthieu
Kassovitz. La
Haine.
Key Terms (tags): human rights, film,
France
Supporting References:
Document
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“Hate may be a French-language
film, set in a specific place and time, but its depiction of
alienated, dead-end teens who clash with authority is universal. As
such, the film is an explosive, cutting-edge portrait of twisted,
wasted lives. Hate is an instant classic of its genre, ranking
alongside adolescent angst dramas from Nicholas Ray's 1950s
breakthrough, Rebel Without a Cause (whose characters are
misunderstood upper-class Southern Californians), to John Singleton's
Boyz N the Hood and the Hughes Brothers' Menace II Society.
The latter are gutsy, non-romanticized portraits of urban
African-America in the 1990s, where guns, drive-by shootings, and
"gangsta" attitude are as much a part of everyday life as
flipping on a television set. In their depictions of young lives
wasting away in an environment of helplessness and hopelessness, Boyz
N the Hood and Menace II Society directly parallel the
sensibility that permeates Hate. Much of the scenario of Hate,
written and directed by 29-year-old Mathieu Kassovitz, is set in a
public housing project just outside Paris. As it begins, adolescents
and police have just violently clashed, with the conflict sparked by
the brutal beating by the cops of a young man named Abdel, who lies
near death in a hospital. The main characters are Abdel's three
friends: the Arab Sayid, the Jewish Vinz, and the black Hubert.
“Of the trio, Vinz is the most
sociopathic. He idolizes one of the most celebrated of all celluloid
psychos: Travis Bickle, the character played by Robert De Niro in
Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. As he glares into a mirror and
imitates Travis, Vinz does not exude a "youtalkin'-to-me"
cool. Rather, he contorts his face, becoming a hideous and horrifying
symbol of contemporary alienated youth.
“The genial Sayid is content to play
tag-along, following in Vinz's shadow. Hubert, meanwhile, is the most
self-aware. He is the only one who can articulate the fact that he
will be unable to flourish if he cannot escape the projects. Yet
Hubert, Sayid, and Vinz remain inexorably linked by their nonexistent
futures. They have neither jobs nor job prospects. The concept of a
"career" and economic independence is not in their realm.
All they do is hang out and smoke marijuana, and they are constantly
harassed by the police. These young men are not inherently violent or
bad, yet their economic status, age, and demeanor allow the
authorities to single them out as troublemakers.
“Forebodingly, Vinz comes into
possession of a Smith & Wesson .44. He promises that, if Abdel
dies, he will get revenge by "whacking a pig." It seems
inevitable that Abdel will die—so watching Hate is like
watching a firecracker waiting to explode.
“Hate is loaded with perverse
irony. The teens are haunted by a phrase—"The World Is
Yours"—from an advertisement that is ever-present on
billboards. Yet clearly, the reality is that the world is not theirs.
These young men have no choices. Their lives are predetermined and,
if they protest, there are plenty of police around to keep them in
their places.
“Another key to the film is the
all-encompassing impact of American culture and consumerism on Sayid,
Hubert, and Vinz, who refer to themselves as "homeboys" and
their neighborhood as "the hood." Their speech is laced
with American pop cultural references, from the movies Lethal
Weapon and Batman to the animated characters Sylvester and
Tweetie and Mickey Mouse. A secondary character wears a Notre Dame
jacket. Another dons a T-shirt which proclaims that "Elvis Shot
JFK." One puts down another by exclaiming, "Your mother
drinks Bud." Another, who is a fence, is nicknamed "Walmart."
“Kassovitz also cannily demonstrates
how poverty and hopelessness extend beyond racial barriers. Here, a
Jew, an Arab, and a black are united by their common experience, and
are equally alienated and anti-social. The Jew and Arab do not clash
over, for example, the politics of the state of Israel, a conflict
that is far removed from their daily lives. The characters are who
they are as individuals, rather than being political or sociological,
let alone stereotypical, mirrors of their ethnicity. They are not
separated by race or religion, but rather are united by age and
economic background, by drugs and wretched educations, and by the
allure of the culture of violence. At one juncture, Vinz asks his
younger sister why she is not in school. "It burned down,"
is the blunt reply. All of this helps to make Hate seem ever
more real.
“Vinz, Hubert, and Sayid may live in
the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs Élysées, yet the
affluence and romance symbolized by these monuments to French
civilization are unattainable. Because they live in a battle zone
that is closer to the South Central Los Angeles depicted in Boyz n
the Hood and Menace II Society, Hate has more in common
with these films than with the French-language features that
celebrate Paris and l'amour.
“Kassovitz' choice to shoot the film
in black-and-white is appropriate, as the lack of an on-screen color
palette helps to stress the bleakness and sterility of his
characters' surroundings. His use of a hand-held camera gives the
film a gritty, cinema-verite feel, and mirrors their disorientation.
Not for an instant are Vinz, Hubert, Sayid, and their cronies in any
way romanticized. And that is how it should be.”
- Kuhn, Annette, and Guy Westwell. "France, film in." A Dictionary of Film Studies. : Oxford University Press, 2012. Oxford Reference. 2012. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
France can boast one of the world's
oldest‐established film industries, and, with a current annual
output of some 240 feature films, the largest output of feature films
in Europe.
On 28 December 1895 the French brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière
presented a programme of projected films to a paying audience in
Paris, and then embarked on an international tour with their
Cinématographe. In the following year, Georges Méliès
presented his first ‘trick‐film’,
Une partie de cartes; and soon after this, Léon Gaumont and
Charles Pathé laid the foundations of their respective film
production enterprises, both of which are still in existence. In 1900
Alice Guy was appointed director of Gaumont and, having already made
La fée aux choux/The Cabbage Fairy (1896), can be counted as
the first of France's many female film directors. The industry
flourished until the outbreak of World War I—successes of the
prewar period include the Film d’Art, a studio and an
internationally successful movement devoted to ‘quality’ film; as
well as Louis Feuillade's popular adventure serial Fantômas
(1913–14)—but it subsequently struggled under pressure of
competition from foreign imports.
However, the silent period saw
enthusiastic involvement on the part of intellectuals in thoughtful
engagement with cinema, a distinctive feature of France's film
culture to this day (see film
criticism; silent
cinema). In the 1920s, for example, alongside
the stunning technical innovations of Abel Gance's Napoleon
(1927), the writer Riciotto Canudo coined the term ‘seventh art’
for the new medium; and the pioneering critic and theorist Louis
Delluc was centrally involved in the founding of the film
society movement. During the 1920s and 1930s,
France's seminal contributions to avant‐garde
and experimental cinema went hand‐in‐hand with important critical
writings on art, politics, and cinema: significant filmmakers,
artists, and film
movements include Jean Epstein (La chute de
la maison Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928); Man Ray;
Fernand Léger, the Surrealism‐influenced
work of Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau, and the Poetic
Realism of Marcel Carné and Jean Vigo. The
1930s also saw the emergence of Popular Front cinema (for example Le
crime de Monsieur Lange/The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir,
1936)) and the founding of the Cinémathèque
Française.
Under the German occupation during
World War II, British and US films were banned; but French production
was able, within limits, to continue. A national film school, IDHEC
(Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques, in 1986 renamed
FEMIS—Institut de Formation et d’Enseignment pour les Métiers de
l’Image et du Son) was established in 1943. In the postwar years,
with the help of government measures (in 1946, the Centre Nationale
de la Cinématographie (CNC) established the principle of state
support for a quota system to protect national production and for
rebuilding cinemas), the domestic film industry enjoyed a significant
revival, and both production and cinema attendances climbed. These
same years saw the rise of an auteur cinema (see authorship),
with such directors as Robert Bresson, Louis Malle, and Alain Resnais
establishing significant bodies of work. The first annual Cannes Film
Festival took place in 1946 and has remained an essential event for
critics and filmmakers around the world ever since (see film
festival). French critics and intellectuals
promoted the serious study of cinema through film
journals (especially the influential Cahiers
du cinéma, launched in 1951; and Positif, founded in the
following year) and scholarly initiatives (see filmology).
In the late 1950s, the first of the European new
waves, the Nouvelle Vague, emerged on
the scene with François Truffaut's Les quatre cents coups/The 400
Blows (1959) and Jean‐Luc Godard's A bout de
souffle/Breathless (1960). In the period following the
revolutionary events of May 1968 there arose a militant
countercinema,
exemplified in particular in works by Godard (such as Le gai
savoir/The Joy of Learning, 1968) and Costa‐Gavras (Z,
1968), in parallel with radical developments in film
theory that were to prove formative in the
establishment of Anglo‐American film studies (see film
studies; ideological
criticism; psychoanalytic
film theory).
Recent developments in French cinema
include the cinéma du look, with its spectacular visual
style, postmodern intertextuality,
and appeal to fantasy:
works such as Diva (Jean‐Jacques Beneix, 1980), Nikita
(Luc Besson, 1990), and Les amants du Pont‐Neuf/The Lovers of
Pont‐Neuf (Léos Carax, 1991) enjoyed popular success both
inside and outside France but were less enthusiastically received by
critics. Ventures into the ‘quality’ territory of the heritage
film include the international art
cinema hits Jean de Florette (Claude
Berri, 1986) and La Reine Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1994).
Alongside these a new cinema of social realism emerged, inaugurated
in the mid 1990s by the controversial La haine/Hate (Mathieu
Kassovitz, 1995), about characters living in the banlieue, the
suburban ghettos on the outskirts of Paris and other French cities.
The realism of this ‘jeune cinema’ centres around themes
of class and ethnicity; concerns which, along with the issues of
immigration and postcolonialism, inform the contemporary movement
dubbed beur
cinema. In the early 2000s, a cycle of
‘postmodern porn’ films by directors including Virginie Despentes
and Coralie Trinh Thi (Baise‐moi/Rape Me, 2000), Gaspar Noé
(Irréversible/Irreversible, 2002), Catherine Breillat (A
ma soeur!/Fat Girl, 2001), attracted some notoriety and earned
the label New French Extremism. See also anthropology
and film; cinéma
vérité; extreme
cinema; film
school; philosophy
and film; postcolonialism;
postmodernism.
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