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Echoes of poetic realism in Matthieu Kassovitz's La haine
Abstract
American mass culture and cinema exerted a decisive influence on Mathieu Kassovitz's La haine (1995). However, the importance of French cultural intertexts for this film has been less appreciated. I argue that 1930s French poetic realism provides a model for understanding Kassovitz's idiosyncratic approach to cinematic realism and to his representation of social tensions in the banlieues. I compare La haine to a subset of poetic realist films that include Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937), Marcel Carné's Quai des brumes (1938), and Carné's Le jour se lève (1939).
This article evaluates the film La Haine (1995) directed by Mathieu Kassovitz with
specific reference to the Bakhtinian concept of “heteroglossia”. The term addresses
“language [as] perceived [and] stratified through and through into multiple social discourses each representing a specific ideological belief system” (Morris, 2003: p. 73).
The film is still socially and politically significant and relevant especially in relation to
the refugee crisis, the increasing xenophobia and islamophobia that continue burdening Europe today. The film can be considered under the rubrics of diasporic cinema,
beur cinema, banlieue cinema and French cinema based on its thematic concerns and
its central characters. This article, however, particularly focuses on the work itself as a
heteroglot, polyglot utterance in the contexts of French film and banlieue film. Secondly, it analyses the framing of the characters as Others in the context of post-industrial,
post-colonial France by focusing on their utterances and the social and cultural connotations of these utterances throughout the film. The close textual analysis reveals that there are several registers of heteroglossia detectable in this audio-visual narrative,
underlying its multilayered character.
This article evaluates the film La Haine (1995) directed by Mathiew Kassovitz with specific reference to the Bakhtinian concept of “heteroglossia”. The film is still socially and politically significant and relevant especially in relation to the refugee crisis, the increasing xenophobia and islamophobia that continue burdening Europe today. The film can be considered under the rubrics of diasporic cinema, beur cinema, banlieue cinema and French cinema based on its thematic concerns and its central characters. This article, however, particularly focuses on the work itself as a heteroglot, polyglot utterance in the contexts of French film and banlieue film. Secondly, it analyses the framing of the characters as Others in the context of post-industrial, post-colonial France by focusing on their utterances and the social and cultural connotations of these utterances throughout the film. The close textual analysis reveals that there are several registers of heteroglossia detectable in this audio-visual narrative, underlying its multilayered character.
Long before Edith Piaf sang "La vie en rose," her predecessors took to the stage of the belle epoque music hall, singing of female desire, the treachery of men, the harshness of working-class life, and the rough neighborhoods of Paris. Icon of working-class femininity and the underworld, the realist singer signaled the emergence of new cultural roles for women as well as shifts in the nature of popular entertainment. Chanteuse in the City provides a genealogy of realist performance through analysis of the music hall careers and film roles of Mistinguett, Josephine Baker, Fréhel, and Damia. Above all, Conway offers a fresh interpretation of 1930s French cinema, emphasizing its love affair with popular song and its close connections to the music hall and the café-concert. Conway uncovers an important tradition of female performance in the golden era of French film, usually viewed as a cinema preoccupied with masculinity. She shows how-in films such as Pépé le Moko, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, and Zouzou-the realist chanteuse addresses female despair at the hopelessness of love. Conway also sheds light on the larger cultural implications of the shift from the intimate café-concert to the spectacular music hall, before the talkies displaced both kinds of live performance altogether.
Representations of urban youth and its cultures of display have become an increasing focus of attention for contemporary cinema. The film La Haine (1995) received critical acclaim for its raw depiction of 'ghetto life' for alienated 'minority' youth in France. In this article, we use this text as a way of exploring the cultural politics of such filmic practices. La Haine's aesthetic strategies of an affective 'hyper-realism' and postmodern authenticity are scrutinized for their racialized politics of representation. The discussion focuses on the film's reflexive presentation of racialized youth and their musical cultures. We argue that while the film lucidly captures the intensity of an urban existence, its aesthetic strategies and self-reflexivity belie a deeper unacknowledged ethico-political relation to racialized Otherness.
Masculinities in Theory is a clear, concise, and comprehensive introduction to the field of masculinity studies from a humanities perspective. Serves as a much-needed introduction to the field for students and scholars of cultural studies, literature, art, film, communication, history, and gender studies. Includes discussions of gay/queer, feminist, and gender studies in relation to masculinity. Covers the key theoretical approaches to the study of masculinity, and introduces new models. Explores the question? What is masculinity and how does it work? Looks at language, discourse, signification, power, cross-dressing, female, queer and transsexual masculinity, race and masculinity, nation and masculinity, interracial masculinities, and masculinities in history.
From the 1995 release of La Haine, critics have questioned whether Jewish-French film director Mathieu Kassovitz is ‘authentic enough’ to speak for the ethnic
banlieue. Yet La Haine is preoccupied with this very anxiety. This article examines how the film self-reflexively explores the place of Jewishness
in the social crisis it dramatizes. La Haine achieves this ‘Jewish’ self-reflexivity primarily through the relationship its arguably most fully realized character, Vinz
(a working-class Ashkenazi Jew), entertains to his more visibly ethnic friends Saïd (an Arab) and Hubert (a black African).
As Vinz navigates the complicated terrain of adolescent relationships striving to become ‘real’, in other words, ethnic, masculine,
authentic, the film also searches for a place for Jewish identity a generation after the ambivalent Jewish encounter with
May 1968 and beyond. Vinz's ambivalent locus between, on the one hand, other minority figures with whom he wishes problematically
to identify and, on the other, the privilege of whiteness vis-à-vis which he occupies a position of complex and uneasy proximity
exemplifies a wider crisis of French Jews on the Left. The article concludes with a discussion of this crisis and how La Haine situates itself in the history of post-war Left Jewish politics in France.
The trope of the mirror is prevalent in La Haine/Hate (1995). Structurally the film is constructed around a series of recurring images, around a collection of cinematic citations reflected and refracted from elsewhere. On a narrative level, characters frequently look into mirrors. However, what becomes visible in the reflective surface of the looking glass is not a sense of identity, but rather a sense of lack. Estranged from their ancestry and marginalized from the society of their present, Vinz, Hubert and Sad borrow from other sources (historical, cinematic, linguistic) in order to create a sense of presence and identity. Like the film in which they star, they frequently borrow from Black American culture, film and heritage. However, the borrowed masks certain characters create for themselves prove to be problematic. They do not always fit. Moreover, the sense of origin they provide is shifting for a number of the sources from which the boys and film borrow are themselves already borrowed. By allowing us to fall into the coils of the palimpsest of Vinz's identity in La Haine, the film powerfully underlines the ever-receding absence which constitutes the only presence of his being.
The emergence of the cinéma des banlieues in France during the mid-1990s reflected a more general socio-political identification with the run-down cités of the disadvantaged urban periphery as emblematic sites of fracture sociale. This article aims to consider the spatial representation of the Parisian banlieue found in two such films, La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995), and Ma 6-T Va Crack-er (Richet, 1997). It will question the extent to which the aesthetic and ideological differences between the two films can be explained by the relationship of the respective filmmakers to the banlieue, or whether, given the media (mis)representation of the banlieue in the 1990s, the disadvantaged urban periphery remained destined to be represented on screen as the space of the marginalised 'other'.