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Screening the 'other' Paris: Cinematic representations of the French urban periphery in La Haine and Ma 6-T Va Crack-er
Abstract
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'.
... These negative depictions of neighbourhoods of the city have persisted into recent films and conflate identity and space in a process of othering. Scholars have highlighted the image of the marginalised 'other' in the banlieue of Paris (Higbee, 2001) or the Parker depiction of African-Americans in the spaces of the ghetto or 'hood (Massood, 1996(Massood, , 2003. Even as some films or filmmakers attempt to dispel negative spatial stereotypes or disrupt hegemonic discourses about these neighbourhoods, the film images reinforce spatial stereotypes and the image of the 'other' (Higbee, 2001). ...
... Scholars have highlighted the image of the marginalised 'other' in the banlieue of Paris (Higbee, 2001) or the Parker depiction of African-Americans in the spaces of the ghetto or 'hood (Massood, 1996(Massood, , 2003. Even as some films or filmmakers attempt to dispel negative spatial stereotypes or disrupt hegemonic discourses about these neighbourhoods, the film images reinforce spatial stereotypes and the image of the 'other' (Higbee, 2001). These authors criticise the construction and reinforcement of these spatial stereotypes and the way that they are tied to particular identities but do not give context within the larger city to other stereotypes. ...
... In replicating the segregated city and in mirroring the processes of othering as discussed by Higbee (2001) and Massood (2003), spatial stereotypes are far from ideal but their function in films enables other more positive outcomes. Film characters can disrupt and transgress these established boundaries as Sox does in Hijack Stories. ...
Stereotypes are people or things categorised by general characteristics of the group based on a truth that is widely recognised and function to reduce ideas to a simpler form (Dyer, 1993). Not all stereotypes are pejorative but can be a form of othering of people (Bhabha, 1996) and come about through a friction with difference (Jameson, 1995). In Johannesburg, South Africa, there is a conflation of people and space that results in a form of spatial categorisation or stereotyping. Under the apartheid government the city’s spaces were divided by race and ethnicity and are currently shifting towards divisions of class and inequality deepening the fragmented post-apartheid conditions in the city. These spatial categories have been represented in films of Johannesburg and contribute to the construction of the city’s image but also construct images for particular neighbourhoods. In this paper I examine the use of space in film as a narrative device and explore the reception and understanding of Johannesburg’s spaces by its residents to illustrate the construction and reception of spatial stereotypes. The paper discusses three dominant spatial stereotypes of Johannesburg through key films and the reception of these films through quantitative and qualitative interviews conducted with residents in four locations (Chiawelo; CBD; Fordsburg and Melville) in Johannesburg. Stereotypes have negative consequences and these spatial stereotypes reflect the ‘city of extremes’ (Murray, 2011) but their use indicates a process of navigation and negotiation across differences in space and identity in the fragmented city of Johannesburg.
... Although La Haine is classified consistently as a key component and ''probably the best known'' (Bluher, 2001, p. 80) of the cine´ma des banlieues genre that arose during the late 1980s in France, its core theme is subject to dispute. Higbee (2001, p. 200), for example, maintains that the central issue of the film ''is social exclusion, not ethnicity,'' while Erin Schroeder (2001, p. 150) defers to ''Kassovitz's insistence that La Haine is most fundamentally a film against the police.'' Also in dispute is the positioning of Vinz as a ''White'' person who either does or does not enjoy a sense of privilege. ...
... When Vinz is not at home and carrying the found gun, his Whiteness is liminal, varying according to the conditions set by the banlieue and its counterweight, central Paris. Vinz's White skin sets him apart from Hubert and Saı¨d, and this becomes most apparent when the trio leaves the banlieue to venture into ''the central hegemonic space of the city'' (Higbee, 2001, p. 201). When attempting to collect a debt from Saı¨d's friend, Astérix (''Snoopy'' in the English translation), they cannot discern which apartment to call because they don't know his formal name. ...
... When they leave the building, Parisian police are waiting for them on the sidewalk. Vinz's Whiteness renders him less visible to the officers, which allows him to get away from them while Hubert and Saı¨d are taken into custody and placed ''in the role of the oppressed (feminised) other'' (Higbee, 2001, p. 201). Kassovitz reminds the viewer that Vinz's Whiteness affords him a greater degree of mobility and prowess outside the banlieue. ...
Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film La Haine (Hate) is recognized as a key component of the cinéma des banlieues genre that arose during the late 1980s in France. By addressing the representational logic of the film's critique of economic and racial tensions in the marginalized cités ringing Paris, this essay tracks how it mediates the construction of postmodern identity. In particular, this analysis positions La Haine as a text that appropriates what I call “postmodern Blackface” as a tropological application of identity that explores the liminality of Whiteness and the performance of postassimilatory difference. Reading Kassovitz's role in relation to his main character, Vinz, encourages close reading of the film as a rich text for cultural critique. This essay first articulates postmodern Blackface as a mediating response to assimilation and Whiteness before considering how La Haine contributes to the evolving rhetorical and cultural interrogation of postassimilatory identity.
... Indeed, most of the generally excellent discussion of this film concentrates on these two issues of plot and politics (cf. Higbee, 2001;Mottet, 2001;Vincendeau, 2005). For the purposes of my argument I want to focus here exclusively on the implications for thinking about the qualities of depthlessness and depth, first, briefly, in terms of production; subsequently within the context of style and meaning. ...
In this essay I consider the device of depthlessness in film. I am interested in particular in the ways in which this device can determine, or at least raise questions about, the nature of the fictional world. Taking my cue from two films from the turn of the century – Gary Ross' 1998 film Pleasantville and Matthieu Kassovitz' 1995 La Haine – as well as, more broadly, arts historical and cultural theoretical debates, where rather more attention has been devoted to the issue of depthlessness, I focus on moments in which depth, that is, in Andre Bazin's oft-cited words, the “continuity” of the fictional realm, is flattened so as to trace the correlation between depthlessness and the ontology of the fictional world. The two strategies I look at are shallow focus and the dolly zoom. What I intend, here, is to offer some first, superficial (no pun intended), reflections that may allow us to begin thinking about this cinematic notion of the depthless as a device and concept in its own right, with its own rationales and implications, just as art historians and cultural theorists have found it an interesting concept by which to study and categorize artistic and cultural developments. There is so much discussion in film studies about depth – from Bazin's discourse about neorealism's “decisive step forward” re-introducing deep focus, to Gilles Deleuze's talk about Orson Welles' “freeing” of depth, it might be helpful to consider its supposedly backwards, “restrictive” antithesis as well.
En este artículo se analiza la banlieue como lugar en el cual se desarrollan dinámicas propias de poder y en el que se presentan fenómenos de radicalización violenta interpretados de diferente manera por parte de la historiografía y la sociología actuales. El hilo conductor de este estudio se centra en las películas francesas La Haine (1995) y Les Misérables (2019), éxitos de taquilla y valiosos ejemplos de cine de banlieue a distancia de más de veinte años la una de la otra.
One of the intertitles from Knocknagow (1918), Ireland’s first feature-length indigenous film directed by Fred O’Donovan, features the following excerpt from a poem by Thomas Davis:
You meet him in his cabin rude
Or dancing with his dark haired Mary
This quote highlights the significance of two major, related cornerstones of an emergent postcolonial manhood; namely the reclamation of property and the marriageable status which this afforded the Irishman. Ireland’s new patriots were considerably more domesticated and community-oriented than the rugged, individual heroes of the American frontier or the ‘model sons’ of Soviet cinema. Indeed, for a film that is overtly propagandist at times, what is particularly striking about Knocknagow is its self-conscious disavowal of spectacular heroics. In one of the opening intertitles, the audience is warned:
As this old tale unfolds there are waiting you neither soul stirring thrills nor sensational climaxes
This conscious rejection of pomposity and theatrics in favour of a grounded, self-effacing male heroism was arguably the crux of post-Independence Irish manhood, and it has been remarkably resilient, despite seismic changes in gender relations and representations over the past century.
In a key scene in Paul Tickell’s film Crush Proof (1999), protagonist Neal and his friend Liam lead a piebald horse through a Dublin housing estate. In a moment of dramatic reflection, reminiscent of the signature soliloquies delivered by anti-heroes Renton in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996) and Tyler Durden in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), the young men exchange the following words:
Neal: There’s nothing waiting for you when you grow up, just the dole, then a hole for your knob, then another one in the nut and then another fucking hole in the ground for your corpse.
Liam: So, until the inevitable, smashing and shagging.
In 2004, sociologist Anne Cleary and a number of colleagues produced a report entitled Young Men on the Margins, in which they stated that social inequality, unemployment, the decline of organised religion, the re-conceptualisation of community and the family and rising levels of crime had had a particularly negative impact on young, working-class men. It is tempting to assume that the cinematic preoccupation with male social exclusion that emerged in the late 1990s/early 2000s was in direct response to the social reality documented by Cleary et al. However, closer analysis of this cycle suggests that more complex cultural and gender-political factors need to be taken into account in order to explain the genesis and popularity of these images and discourses.
In July 2011, the Cloyne Report was published. It examines how both the Catholic Church and the state handled allegations of abuse against 19 clerics in the County Cork diocese up until 2009. Shortly after its publication, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny delivered an impassioned speech to Dáil Eireann, the Irish Parliament, condemning the Vatican and the institutional church in Ireland. Kenny accused the Vatican of downplaying the rape and torture of children to protect its power and reputation and of refusing to cooperate in investigations as recently as three years ago. His speech marked a watershed moment in the state’s deteriorating relationship with the Catholic Church, not least because in it he made clear that Canon Law may never be exempt from the laws of the state:
This is not Rome. Nor is it industrial-school or Magdalene Ireland, where the swish of a soutane smothered conscience and humanity, and the swing of a thurible ruled the Irish Catholic world. This is the Republic of Ireland, 2011. A republic of laws, of rights and responsibilities, of proper civic order, where the delinquency and arrogance of a particular version of a particular kind of morality will no longer be tolerated or ignored.1
The so-called riots, taking place in French suburbs in November 2005, reopened a public and academic debate on character of French immigration policy and its future. Article aims to outline a wider context of immigration issue in France by analyzing both institutional and discursive aspects of construction of image of foreigner in historic relation of inter-national domination between dominant group represented by state and its republican model of integration and inferior group of North African immigrants. Article considers some theoretical implications of relations between a project of nation-state and institution of citizenship, which in France led to the genesis and evolution of assimilation model of integration. In such a framework, colonial discourse represent historically important example of construction of foreigner's image, which shaped later political debates on reconstitution and "crises" of French nation-state. Moreover, history and development of French immigration policy is presented in context of some structural changes in labour market, which led to the establishment of new international division of labour and new kind of urban poverty. Concentration of the working-class poor immigrants in highly modernistic neighbourhoods and its spatial segregation is the most visible unintended consequence of French immigration policy. Special attention is paid to the reformulation of immigration issue as a security problem, which revived colonial discourse by reification of cultural differences and by ethnicization of social relations. Instead of blaming second and third generation immigrants for their failure to integrate into major society, unrests form November 2005 should be understood as a specific form of political and cultural protest against their structural discrimination in work, housing and everyday life as a result of new image of dangerous foreigners created by more restrictive measures of immigration policy.
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 explores the constructions of urban space, national identity and gender mediated by an important genre of contemporary French cinema, the film de banlieue. Over the last 20 years, films by both French and French-Maghrebi filmmakers determined to show the reality of life on the outskirts of France's major cities have paradoxically helped reinforce notions of the grands ensembles as places outside the mainstream of culture and identity. In her movie Jeunesse Dorée (2002), filmmaker Zaïda Ghorab-Volta uses the simple narrative of a road trip made by two young working-class women around France photographing these ensembles to subvert various forms of discursive emplacement that have resulted from the convergence between inhuman built environments and filmic representations of those environments that exploit ethnic difference and glamorize masculine violence. Although the film recognizes the incarcerative nature of these modernist neighbourhoods for women, it does not mediate a simplistic rejection of the banlieu. Instead, Jeunesse Dorée proposes a working class solidarity that cuts across place, race and gender, and a relationship between (urban) modernity and (geographical) citizenship that reworks mainstream French ways of thinking about urban culture and the space of nationhood. The young women's project of ‘framing modernity’ also works within the film as a mise en abyme, recuperating high modernist theories of mediated vision as a primary link between cities and their hinterlands.
My thesis “The Right to be Different: Film, French Identity, and the National Space of French North Africans” asks two questions: Why do French North Africans continue to face high levels of prejudice and social marginalization even as they attempt to fulfill all the requirements of Republican French identity? How do film portrayals of North Africans provide an explanation for such issues of marginalization? Specifically, it analyzes depictions from four different films of French North African conceptions of personal identity, their interactions with native white French, and the legacy of the colonial period. My thesis discusses these films within the context of broader scholarship on how the concept of Republicanism contributes to French national identity and the challenges it is facing in the new millenium, and how collective memory of the Algerian War of Independance continues to affect the treatment French North Africans receive.
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