​QUESTIONS ON the film: LA HAINE.

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QUESTIONS ON LA HAINE.Answer FIVE (5) of the following questions. but you need to answer questions 8 and 9.1. Explain the significance of the title to the main characters.2. How are the immigrant families treated in La Haine?3.Explain the themes of desperation, frustration and loneliness in the film.4.Explain the significance of the “banlieues” in the film.5.Analyze one of the central characters in the film.6.Discuss the role of the police in this film.7.Discuss the idea that the creation of the “banlieues” was essentially an experiment in failure, designed to get the immigrants to participate in their own demise.8.How is this cultural misunderstanding expressed in La Haine? Issues of citizenship, immigration, migration and ‘foreignness’ 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 area, issues such as unemployment and economic recession. Also, differences (of language, race, religion) between the migrant populations and the mainstream citizens exacerbate cultural misunderstanding. Show how this applies to La Heine.9.Nationalism is generally considered to be a political ideology that the notion of a nation built by and shared by people having a common language, race, ethnicity, etc. Another concept of nationalism is to have common “glories in the past, to have a common will in the present, to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more …” Considering either or both of these ideologies of what nationalism is, how do the concepts shape or not shape the cultural capital of the three protagonists in La Haine? In other words, do you feel that the young men can or cannot participate in the process of being a part of the French nation?

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La 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- SaintDenis, 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.
• Film begins with black-and-white
documentary footage of real riots and starts,
as a result, with a feel of historical
authenticity.
• Cinematographic choice to shoot in a similar
black-and-white look seems to bind the film
proper to the stock footage with which it
opens: on the one hand, the fiction of La
Haine is allowed the authority of history.
• The story begins the day after a riot in which a
police inspector’s gun has gone missing: on
the other hand, then, history fills in narrative
blanks, as the tumult recorded in the stock
footage acts as a surrogate for the fictional
riot that we are not allowed to see.
• The opening sequence, for example, is
tethered to the specific slum of the film: the
shot of the world turns out to be only a frayed
poster stuck to a wall.
• These posters, appearing all over the city and
apparently advertising optimistic outward
reaching (“the world is yours”), in fact
reinforce the walls that surround the
characters.
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.
• When Saïd spray paints one of these images,
changing the tag line to “the world is ours”, it
seems less like an affirmation of the poster’s
sentiment and instead a grim realization that
his world, the banlieue, is inescapable.
• The voice that accompanies the image of the
globe feels like the omniscient presence of a
narrator.
• 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 neoracism 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 multiethnic 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 dreamlike (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?

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