La Haine - Opening Sequence

The opening scene to La Haine is vital to us as an audience; we are manipulated straight away to believe the information we are shown. This is key to the director being able to put across what he envisioned this topic as himself through his own experiences. The opening scene sets the framework as well as the ideology of the director, therefore when the film begins properly we are able to recognise the signifiers of what we believe is wright and wrong, depending on how we perceive the opening scene. In the rioting montage, we are manipulated both by sound and the mise-en-scene visuals we see. In the opening shot of the riot, we see a visual signifier of the over powering force of the police through a shot of a man standing alone against an army of militarised police. This consciously sways us to believe the police are antagonists and sets the framework for us to take sides with the ‘projects’. We also know prior to the film that the riots were taken place over ten years, therefore when we see the montage of the riots, we are seeing a minor detail of what actually happened. Such as how the media portrayed the projects at the time the film was made, as antagonists through the use of media and editing to seemingly show the projects as the instigators and pinpoint of trouble. To conclude, the director easily manipulates us in the same way the media did to the public in the time of the actual riots, however in this case we are manipulated to believe the police are the instigators of trouble. This is seen through the shot of the projects dancing and seeming not threatening, following that we then see a shot of another army militarised police force. Therefore we assume the projects are protagonists; even though this may not be entirely true yet it showcases the directors POV of the rioting that happened in Paris and, creates a framework for what is to follow. We also notice the use of the metaphor in which the firebomb being thrown represents. It reflects Hubert’s worldview, a bomb waiting to explode. This relates to the man falling from the building. In that it underlines his beliefs of the inevitable ending and collapsing of society. The non-diegetic music used for the opening scene is in cohesion with the shots we see. Such that we see a shot of a militarised man and vehicle, which coheres along side the line in the song saying ‘uniforms of brutality’; the use of the music is a way in which we are constantly consciously reinforced by the director to perceive the police in a way he wants us to. The idea that the police are faceless also represent a key theme to the film, in that they do not individually have a hand in responsibility yet some police are individually brutal which we find out later in the film, however it represents how they are all just part of the embedded ways and ideologies exposed by the state, therefore they simply are just a force that solely poses as the state as a whole.