Film Analysis Of La Haine

Favourite Film Analysis – La Haine (1995. France. Mathieu Kassovitz)

Mathieu Kassovitz’s ground-breaking film “La Haine” explores the lives of three youths who live in a “banlieue” (housing estate) just outside Paris. It’s an auteurist film with every element inflected by Kassovitz’s creative personality. When it was released in 1995 it gave rise to various socio-political issues that had been previously ignored in France. This paper will consider the role that each of the film ‘arts’ play in “La Haine” and an explanation of why it’s my all-time favourite film.

Mise-en-scene & Narrative: “La Haine” opens with grainy footage of young men protesting and rioting against police in the poor 1990s Parisian estates. We are immediately introduced to

Kassovitz films the first half on the estate with a short wide lens and the later scenes in Paris with a longer lens. The outcome of this, though very subtle, is that in the housing estates we can see more and the people appear as part of the scenery, but in Paris we see less and people appear distant from their background. Kassovtiz uses a variety of shots but the most memorable is a helicopter shot over housing blocks while DJ Cut Killer blasts hip hop infused with Edith Piaf. The film is in black and white which matches the nature of the story and rundown

I was from a well-off family and lived in a peaceful neighbourhood but I could still see that the youths from marginalised communities around me felt they had nothing to look forward to and no purpose. There was also a palpable tension between them and the authorities. Oddly enough this fascinated me. My friends and I loved gangster and hood films and we would get together to watch one after the other, anything from “Goodfellas” to “Menace II Society”. After seeing “La Haine” for the first time I was stunned because here was a film that had all the story elements of my favourite films, but was set in a world that I was familiar with. Over the years, as I watched the film time and time again, I started to notice the intricacies of narrative, tone, themes, and creative cinematography. “La Haine” taught me that there is so much more to film than first meets the eye. Every time I watched it I would notice something new, and to this day, even after having watched it hundreds of times, I still come across nuanced aspects I had somehow previously missed. I once read a quote from Roger Ebert that sums up my experience with “La Haine”: "Every great film should seem new every time you see it". Mathieu Kassovitz had such autonomy in his creation. It was real yet still radical. He brought originality and