Source: http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os0tmc/contemp1/lahaine.htm
Introduction
When a film called La Haine was released in France in 1995 it caused something of a stir.
A sucess at the French box office, with around 500,000 viewers in the first six weeks of
its release, as well as with the critics (it won the Best Director Award at Cannes), it
became one of the most controversial and talked about French films in recent years.
The interest was unusual as the film was written and directed by a largely unknown
young filmmaker and actor. Moreover, it was filmed in black and white, with no big name
stars on a small budget (an estimated FF15 million). In Kassovitz, France, it seemed, had
produced a young, talented and provocative filmmaker to rival American directors like
Spike Lee, Quentin Tarrantino or even Britain's Danny Boyle.
Reactions to La Haine
The stir La Haine caused was, in part, due to its controversial subject matter - les
banlieues (the suburbs) - which had, since the 1980s, become synonymous with France's
major problems of unemployment, social exclusion, racial conflict, (sub)urban decay,
criminality and violence. It was also due, in part, to its negative portrayal of the police who,
with the exception of one officer of North African descent, are represented as violent,
racist and uncomprehending. It was also due in part to its sympathetic, some might say
indulgent, representation of an excluded and multi-ethnic suburban youth
Another reason for the stir La Haine caused, in critical circles at least, was the way it
broke with the trends and preoccupations of French cinema in the 1980s and 1990s.
In rather crude terms, French cinema in the 1980s and early 1990s is dominated by two
main trends: the so-called `heritage' film (`le cinéma du patrimoine') and the so-called `le
cinéma du look' (also known as `cinéma du Forum des Halles').
Claude Berri's Jean de Florette (1985) and Manon des Sources (1986) and Jean-Paul
Rappeneau's Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) are examples of the first trend and enjoyed
national and international sucess. `Heritage' films are often literary adaptations made on
a large budget with well-known stars. The `heritage' film refers back to the tradition de
qualité that the filmmakers of la nouvelle vague rejected in the late 1950s and 1960s.
`Heritage' film also appealed to a large audience through their depiction of the passions
and intrigues of rural France in earlier, and perhaps, simpler times. As Jill Forbes has
pointed out:
... some of the most popular films of the late 1980s and early 1990s exploited the idea of
the Third Republic as the quintessential French heritage, whether represented in an
idyllic rural setting in Claude Berri's Jean de Florette (1985) and Manon des Sources
(1986), or an exploitative industrial environment as in his adaptation of Émile Zola's
Germinal (1993).
J.Forbes & M. Kelly, French Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995) p.260
Luc Besson's Subway (1985) and Nikita (1990); Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva (1981) and
370 2 le matin (1986); and Léos Carax's Boy meets Girl (1984), Mauvais sang (1986)
and Les Amants du Pont Neuf (1991) are examples of the second dominant trend. Often
set, as the name suggests, in Paris (Diva, Subway, Les Amants du Pont Neuf), these
films are marked by their preoccupation with style and surface - they have been likened
to both images in advertisments and to MTV video clips - and by their unashamedly
escapist intent. Full of implausible characters and plots (a female assassin from a secret
state organisation, a subterrean criminal community living in the métro etc.) and highly
stylized action sequences (car chases, fights etc.), these films also appealed to a wide
audience in both France and throughout the rest of the world and some - Luc Besson's
Nikita springs to mind - were remade by Hollywood.
What both trends have in common is their avoidance of any serious representation of
problems and issues in contemporary France, although arguably Carax's Mauvais sang
(le sida) and Les Amants du Pont Neuf (les nouveaux pauvres) are something of an
exception here. It could be claimed that the Mitterand years presided over a kind of
consensus about what kind of cinema was appropriate for France at the time. The
problems of unemployment, social unrest in the suburbs, increasing racial tensions and
the rise of the Front National were all absent from French cinema screens.
Un cinéma de banlieue
Haine (avoir la): développer à propos de quelqu'un ou d'une situation un sentiment de
rage profonde.
A. Begag & C. Delorme, Quartiers sensibles (Paris: Seuil, 1994) p.7
It wasn't until the mid-1990s, that is to say, after the electoral defeat of Mitterand and the
election of a right-wing government that other distinctive trends began to emerge. One of
the trends that generated considerable media attention in 1995/6 was the emergence of
the so-called cinéma de banlieue. Films like Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995),
Thomas Gilou's Raï (1995), Jean-François Richet's État des lieux (1995) and Karim
Dridi's Bye Bye (1996) confirmed a new preoccupation with the gritty reality of France's
run-down suburbs.
Unusually, La Haine was shot in black and white, on grainy film stock, on location in a
suburban housing estate called La Cité de la Nöe in Chanteloup-les-Vignes (Yvleines)
with unknown or little known actors. Stylistically, it signalled an affinity with la nouvelle
vague of the 1950s and 1960s, rather than the extravagant production values of the
1980s and 1990's which had seen a number of high budget films like Léos Carax's Les
Amants du Pont-Neuf and Claude Berri's Germinal. Thematically too, in its focus on a
younger generation in a contemporary setting, it broke away from the period literary
adaptations that were common in the 1980s and 1990s.
Kassovitz and la crise des banlieues
Since the late 1970s a `new problem' emerged in French political debates: the problem of
les banlieues (the suburbs). Since then les banlieues have become, in popular opinion, in
the media and amongst France's political élites, a stigmatized space of social
fragmentation, racial conflict, (sub)urban decay, criminality and violence.
As the comments made above suggest, the English word suburb conveys little of the
meanings of the French word banlieue. The word suburb in an British or North American
context evokes leafy streets of Tudorbethan semi-detached houses with neatly clipped
lawns and shining Volvos in every drive.
The French word banlieue on the other hand evokes an entirely different set of
connotations - drugs, crime, delinquency, civil disorder, Islamic fundamentalism and even
terrorism - all of them negative. Les banlieues are not full of comfortable houses for an
affluent middle class, but are composed, rather, of large high-rise blocks full of the very
poorest of France's population. If there is one term that is particularly used to describe
the inhabitants of les banlieues it is les exclus, that is to say those excluded from playing
an active role in and enjoying the fruits of the affluent society.
The `problem' of les banlieues became particularly prominent from the early 1980s
onwards when violent confrontations (émeutes, affrontements) between suburban youths
and the police took place in a number of the banlieues surrounding France's major cities
like, for example, Vaulx-en- Velin (1990) and Vénissieux (1994) near Lyon and
Sartrouville near Paris.
Les banlieues became the main theme of thousands of newspaper and magasine articles
with dramatic titles evoking the impending social meltdown (e.g. La poudrière des
banlieues, Elle monte, elle monte, la fièvre en banlieue, Banlieue damnée and Banlieue
explosive) or else drawing comparison with American inner-city ghettos and their racial
violence (e.g. Banlieue-ghetto, Le Bronx à Paris). In the 1980s and 1990s, the banlieues
become the focal point in France for anxiety about the Other (i.e. in order to define
ourselves, we need to construct somebody who we are not to define ourselves against),
that is to say, the frighteningly different kind of French men and women living a few
kilometres away from the affluent middle-class cities.
Character and Events
La violence urbaine est activée par un mot commun et à la mode: «la haine»,
évoquant un sentiment confus d'aggressivité. Elle trace des territoires invisibles
entre les immeubles et les habitants, délimite des zones socio-ethniques dont on
sent déjà les frontières. Des identités territorialisées s'affirment. Les violences
influencent la cohésion d'un groupe, contribuent à approfondir la conscience
d'appartenir à une communauté, d'autant plus solide parce qu'il s'agit d'une
communauté d'exclus.
A. Begag & C. Delorme, Quartiers sensibles (Paris: Seuil, 1994) pp.59-60
The initial story for La Haine came from a real-life fait divers: the shooting of a sixteenyear-old Zairean youth called Makomé Bowole in police custody in 1993. Unlike the
Rodney King affair (a black man beaten by LAPD police officers was caught on videotape)
which received wider public attention, Makomé's death went relatively unreported and
unnoticed.
La Haine follows one day in the lives of three young banlieusards: Vinz, of Jewish
descent, Saïd, a Beur, and Hubert, of African origin. Kassovitz replaces the bleu, blanc,
rouge of the tricolore with the beur, blanc, `black' of the banlieues. The three friends are
shown living by their wits, surviving on petty crime and small-time drug deals on a low
income housing estate outside Paris. It's no ordinary day for them however, as a riot has
just taken place on their estate, a friend has been assaulted in police custody and lies in
hospital in a coma. To make things more explosive, Vinz finds a police revolver (une
flingue) dropped, or stolen, during the rioting. As the three hang out together, picking over
the aftermath of the riot and discussing the condition of their comatose friend, the tension
mounts
The film is about the interracial solidarity of a small gang (une bande) of friends, divided
by race, religion and ethnicity but joined by the common bonds of geographical and
economic isolation. Living a life far removed from the far away from affluence of middleclass or tourist Paris, the three eke out a living by dodging and diving, working smallscale scams like dealing dope and handling stolen goods. Kassovitz is not so much
interested in inter-racial violence - this is only touched upon briefly as part of a broader
antagonism between young banlieusards and the police - but on a specific class (or
underclass) and generation.
Film Details
La Haine/Hate (18)
France 1995. 95 mins. B & W.
Director: Mathieu Kassovitz
Cast: Vincent Cassel, Hubert Kounde, Saïd Taghmaoui
Producer: Christophe Rossignon
Script: Mathieu Kassovitz
Camera: Pierre Aïm
Editor: Mathieu Kassovitz & Scott Stevenson
Further Reading
For further discussion of the so-called crise des banlieues - a useful starting point for an
engagement with Kassovitz's representation of it - go to:
o
Les Années banlieues