La Haine - Question

La Haine presents a realistic view of an ideology, through challenging key crime genre conventions, thus offering a documentary style of film.

The opening scene of La Haine begins with a riot montage that took place over a ten-year period; straightaway this challenges the audience’s typical ideology of French society. The fact that the director uses real life footage gives the audience a more significant effect as he try’s to manipulate us in order for us to take on the message more, how to show how non- French people are targeted not just due to their race but also because of their class. People usually associate French society with love, romance, and culture. As with the film Amelie that will looked at in contrast to this film we see that the people are mostly white, it is very French not may other religions are seen, the director in this film has also digital removed any graffiti that can bee seen throughout the scenes; this therefore gives the audience a false idea of what French culture is actually like. Meanwhile La Haine gives us a more realistic view of what French society is like but because the audience isn’t use to this it challenges our ideologies.

La Haine challenges the audience expectations throughout the entire film as it was written by Kassovitz to comment on the social position of non-French people in the projects. This being said there are certain scenes that attempt to challenge expectations more than others. The montage scene at the start was used by Kassovitz to present the 'real' Paris and not the unrealistic representation that we are fed through the media and other films such as Amelie which present Paris as bright, beautiful and the city of love. The montage shows real footage of riots and police brutality in Paris over a 10 year time gap but it is edited as if it all happened the previous night. Kassovitz does this to try to link the montage to the storyline as it is based the day after a young non-French male is killed during a riot. There is a certain shot in which a group of peaceful protesters dance in front of the police, not doing any harm but trying to voice their opinion. The shot then cuts to a different shot in which a policeman throws a rock at rioters in the distance. He is seen to be 'dancing' as well but in an aggressive and aggravated way which proposes that he is actually enjoying the violence. The shots are edited together to look like they are the same event when in actuality they could of been years apart. This attempts to challenge the audiences expectations as they may not have known about the riots as they haven't been shown in the media to the extent that La Haine showed it.

This essay shows a clear contrast of both films, using sophisticated English language, as well as showing clear understanding of the context of both films, as well as the outcomes that both films achieve, in their own stylistic way.