Here is a short extract from a very good analysis of 'La Haine'. It is well worth a read to deepen your understanding of the issues involved in the 'Urban Stories' topic.
Amy Siciliano1 (Full essay)
“We don’t exist, nobody sees us” A youth from a banlieue outside of Paris – Laperyronnie, 1992; quoted in Wacquant, 1993, 377
Since the 1990’s the spaces of the French banlieues – once beyond the boundaries of the dominant geographic imaginary – now emanate images of deviance, violence, and disorder (Hargreaves, 1996); part and parcel of an increasingly globalized image regime. In the wake of uprisings in these suburban regions, most recently in the fall of 2005, youth from the banlieues have been branded as a ‘symptom’ – projected through a prism of structural risks (such as globalization and advanced capitalism) and cultural fears (such as immigration and national identity) – of a nation in crisis.2 It was in the midst of this moment – marked by a rising tide of reactionary nationalism – that ‘banlieue films’ emerged in France. The most critically acclaimed and commercially successful film of this period was Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), a story which captures one day in the life of three young ‘outcasts’ from a Parisian banlieue. In this paper I examine how the film’s narrative style and cinematic form confront this spatialized and historicized anxiety, interrogating assumptions behind dominant representations of banlieues and youth. The film not only renders visible people and places hitherto denied the right to represent themselves – it does so without harbouring any illusions concerning the ideological nature of representing the so- called ‘underclass’ and its habitat. In other words, it is not sufficient to read La Haine as an exposé of the alienated everyday life of the ‘underclass’ in the banlieue: much of its artistic and political value comes from critical reflections on the many levels of mediation between the film itself and the material conditions which gave rise to its production.
Many reviewers have noted (and sometimes faulted) the film for centering its problematic not on ethnic differences, but rather on the socio-spatial inequities between Paris and its suburbs. Indeed, space plays a central role in determining the aesthetic of the film, and is profoundly constitutive of the protagonists’ subject formations. But it is precisely because the film devotes such attention to this spatiality – without resorting to a ‘remapping’ of the social – that makes it of particular interest to critical geographers of the city. As Jameson (1992, 2) notes, the totality of forces contributing to “urban dissolution and reghettoization” cannot simply be socially ‘mapped’ (be it spatial, cognitive, cinematic, or otherwise), because it inevitably only provides a caricature of the globalized structure of relations producing the spaces our lived experience. What is key is how such tools render visible the mediated relationship between ideology, representational practices, and the spaces of everyday life, evoking a sense of how such relations are materially grounded and historically produced (Goonewardena, 2005). The film speaks to both the suburbanization of poverty and racialization of the suburbs in France through a postmodern fragmentary aesthetic to ‘shock’ as Walter Benjamin ([1936] 2005) might say, its viewers into insight. The juxtaposition of images, sounds, and camera angles, alongside the narrative itself evince veiled relations between space and time, prodding its audience to question received attitudes and perceptions, or the various levels of mediation that have enabled the words ‘banlieue youth’ to become synonymous with crime, poverty and arrested social development.
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