In this essay I shall be looking at how Kassovitz uses mise en scene, cinematography, editing and sound in his film La Haine (d. Kassovitz, 1995).

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La Haine analysis

In this essay I shall be looking at how Kassovitz uses mise en scene, cinematography, editing and sound in his film La Haine (d. Kassovitz, 1995). I shall look at how he demonstrates to the audience all of the problems that are present in the banlieue. To conclude, I shall show how successful I believe he has been in representing the problems of life in this particular stratum of French life. This film looks at the relationship between three young men living in the banlieues of France. La Haine was quite controversial when it was released and caused quite a stir, mainly for the way it was shot and its narrative content.

Many of the films released in France at this time fell into two categories: the heritage film and the cinema du look. The heritage film, as the name suggests concentrated primarily on historical events, and were set in the past similar to the English period dramas. Whereas the cinema du look films were much more concerned with how the film looked, and were visually spectacular. Yet La Haine bought with it a new film genre, that of the cinema du banlieue, which depicted the more poverty stricken side of French city life. Similar to the English Social Realist films, these films concentrated on unemployment, housing estates and riots. Other banlieue films are not readily available, however the first banlieue film was titled Deux Ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais D'Elle' (d. Jean Luc Goddard, 1967). This film is a dramatised documentary looking at prostitution, unemployment and the lack of emotion towards the Atomic War, and was a banlieue film before the term was even invented. I will refer to key scenes within the film to show how successful Kassovitz has been when representing this way of life.

In La Haine, the banlieue is represented as a bad place to live, the equivalent to the British council estates. As Ardagh writes, "la banlieue' has today come to evokesocial tensions, delinquency, high jobless rates, frustration, maybe racial conflict" . And as we can see in the film, apart from maybe Hubert and his gym, the other main characters don't have jobs, and they all, especially Vinz seem to have delinquent behaviour. This is shown to the audience in many ways, and in many key scenes which I shall look into further in the essay. The housing estate where the boys live looks very crowded. When we see Vinz, Hubert and Said walking around amongst the banlieue, there are lots of other youths just standing around, talking to each other. The whole estate looks dirty because of the high volume of graffiti on almost everything. There are lots of high rise flats, which house lots of people, but each flat is small. The banlieue looks very small and claustrophobic, almost prison like. We can see this when we see inside Hubert's and Vinz's flats. Vinz shares his room with his sister, and the dining room is very small, as it barely holds a table. This is similar in Hubert's flat, as the kitchen and dining room are difficult to move around. This suggests the sheer poverty of life in the Banlieue. We hear some dialogue between Hubert and his mother about him wanting to leave the banlieue, and she just humours him because unless things change drastically, he won't ever be able to get out. We discover that he used to have a gym, which was burned down in the riots, but it was something he was proud of, something he worked for. He had made a positive step in his life to try and get out of where he lives, yet because of where he lives, this was destroyed. The fact the film is shot in black and white adds a lot to its representation of the banlieue. It makes the whole film appear more gritty and real-life, like CCTV or a documentary, it makes the banlieue seem more depressing. It also shows the emphasis on racism with clear cut black and white imagery. The films dialogue is very slang-ish, and shows the audience that this film isn't high class. It is trying to represent real people, and real situations, so the use of slang allows people to identify with this way of life. There is also a lot of meaningless dialogue. For example, Said's little brother, talking about Candid Camera seems meaningless, and the point Kassovitz is trying to make is that it IS meaningless. Not everything in everyday life has a point and meaning, and he is trying to represent real life, where pointless conversations occur. Similarly, Said's jokes seem to have no purpose, as well as some of the other dialogue between characters. But as mentioned, this happens in real life and therefore this film represents real life.

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The way families and women are represented in La Haine is very distinct. There is a severe lack of a nuclear family. Vinz lives with his mother, grandmother and sister, and he is scared of his grandmother, which we can see when he goes to collect her peppers. She has authority in that house, yet we only ever see her inside those walls. Hubert lives with his pregnant mother and his sister, and we learn that his brother has gone to jail. When the boys are in Paris, we learn that Said lives with his sister and brother, and ...

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