In terms of semiotics, a thorough analyse could be carried out on La Haine. This demonstrates the power of cinema in spreading culture messages about social issues and social reality.
In an interview, Vincent Cassel (Vinz) mentioned that a mere 500 people turned up to demonstrate in the streets when a youth was shot by a police officer but over 2 million people watched La Haine. As the film was almost a realist production, the social issues represented by Kassovitz was already part of a public discourse, and so the French public found it easy to understand the cultural meaning constructed by the film. The story carries representations of real riots that happened in France between the youth and the authorities. Whilst La Haine is technically a youth picture made up of fiction, the story is rooted in reality. This is even further compounded by the fact that the three main actors are Jewish, Afro-French and Maghreb. This scene makes a statement about the increasing hybridity of french youth culture in ‘les banlieues’.
In one scene a DJ mixes the voice of Edith Piaf with a rap beat that is played through speakers over the suburban parisian estate. As Roy Stafford points out, the popular music used is a combination of old style French music with internationalist rap scores. Whilst other foreign films are often translated to an english title when reaching a British market, La Haine maintained its French title and thus withholds a strong sense of national identity. Whilst Kassovitz is a great admirer of American directors, and La Haine did have American influences, the film was still deemed ‘too French’ for American audiences.Īlthough La Haine did effectively reach an international market it still maintains a strong sense of French identity.
La haine french movie movie#
On the other hand, the fact that American cinema audiences found it hard to relate to the movie could show the pressure on modern cinema to become homogeneous in nature to have a realistic attempt at finding a global market. The fact that this film made it to the top 15 in international cinema charts could be seen to undermine the global power of the big cinema corporations in controlling what is culturally produced, and what becomes popular. Whilst there are recurring themes from American popular culture within the movie, in terms of Vinz’s imitations of Robert De Niro from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, the production is undoubtedly French. La Haine is a representation of French youth culture and would therefore arguable have the effect of global cultural diversity, rather then uniformity.
However, this would not support the popular argument that globalisation leads to an increasing global uniformity of society. In terms of debates around globalisation these facts would support the idea that we are now able to view cultural symbols from areas that aren’t necessarily local. Whilst La Haine was made with a relatively small budget of 1.5 million pounds it grossed around 300 thousand dollars and achieved distribution in both Britain and America. The film received a great response in France and is now popular in Britain and parts of North America. The film is set in ‘les banlieues’ in Paris and based around three main characters who differ greatly not just in their ethnicity, but also their outlook on reality.
La Haine is a French black and white drama/suspense film directed by Matthew Kassovitz.
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