La haine movie summary

QUESTIONS ON LA HAINE. Answer FIVE (5) questions. All students must answer questions 8 and 9. Questions should be submitted in hard-copy format, typewritten, double spaced. 1. Explain the significance of the title to the main characters. 2. How are the immigrant families treated in La Haine? 3. Discuss the role of the police in this film. 4. How is this cultural misunderstanding expressed in La Haine? Issues of citizenship, immigration, migration and ‘foreignness’ are often imbued with the socio-cultural constructions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ by a particular society. Societies often scapegoat immigrants for a number of societal ills unrelated to the migrant populations in a specific geographical area, issues such as unemployment and economic recession. Also, differences (of language, race, religion) between the migrant populations and the mainstream citizens exacerbate cultural misunderstanding. Show how this applies to La Heine. 5. Nationalism is generally considered to be a political ideology that the notion of a nation built by and shared by people having a common language, race, ethnicity, etc. Another concept of nationalism is to have common “glories in the past, to have a common will in the present, to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more …” Considering either or both of these ideologies of what nationalism is, how do the concepts shape or not shape the cultural capital of the three protagonists in La Haine? In other words, do you feel that the young men can or cannot participate in the process of being a part of the French nation? La Haine • “We don’t exist, nobody sees us” A youth from a banlieue outside of Paris • Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. • Title derives from a line spoken by one of the protagonists, Hubert: "La haine attire la haine!", "hatred breeds hatred." Setting • The French bainlieue (specifically, Seine- SaintDenis, 93) • Located outside the city limits of Paris. • Bainlieus (ZUP - zone à urbaniser en priorité) constructed by French as “affordable” housing” for immigrant population. • Create socio-economic and socio-spatial inequities between Paris and its suburbs. • For centuries, Europe has sent its citizens throughout the world as explorers, conquerors, imperialists, civilization builders, etc. • Things have now changed for Europe. For the first time in centuries, people are struggling to enter and stay in Europe to find new lives • While the pattern may seem similar to the immigration patterns of the US, the history of Europe and its sense of nationalism make it markedly different. • La Haine brings the issue of immigration to the forefront. • The film centers its problematic not on ethnic differences, but rather on the socio-spatial inequities between Paris and its suburbs. • The film is also an allegory for the postcolonial • present. • “Bainlieue” are the homes of outcast minorities whom reside in the French metropolis, in which the youth are forced into the life of violence and crime from their lack of a national identity. • Film begins with black-and-white documentary footage of real riots and starts, as a result, with a feel of historical authenticity. • Cinematographic choice to shoot in a similar black-and-white look seems to bind the film proper to the stock footage with which it opens: on the one hand, the fiction of La Haine is allowed the authority of history. • The story begins the day after a riot in which a police inspector’s gun has gone missing: on the other hand, then, history fills in narrative blanks, as the tumult recorded in the stock footage acts as a surrogate for the fictional riot that we are not allowed to see. • The opening sequence, for example, is tethered to the specific slum of the film: the shot of the world turns out to be only a frayed poster stuck to a wall. • These posters, appearing all over the city and apparently advertising optimistic outward reaching (“the world is yours”), in fact reinforce the walls that surround the characters. The Protagonists • Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson present their definition of youth culture “as symbolic or ritualistic attempts to resist the power of bourgeois hegemony by consciously adopting behavior that appears threatening to the establishment” (1993). • Film follows the lives of three young men and their time spent in a banlieue over the span of twenty-four hours.