How far can it be argued that your chosen films provide a ‘realistic’ representation of the people and places they focus upon?

Both films I have studied display varying levels of realism in their representation of people and places, one more so than another, as well as in their depictions of power, poverty and conflict.

One of the greatest and most realistic examples of power in Mathieu Kassovitz’s film La Haine is the media. The film’s representation of the media is a very negative one; they act as an institution an extension of the state and their agenda. This is best demonstrated in a scene early on in the first part of the film, as a news van pulls up above La Haine’s trio of characters as they talk arbitrarily and time passes. The opening tracking shot towards them positions them in their roles in the plot as well as in their friendship group. Said is the mediator between Hubert and Vinz and positioned so here in this shot. There is a quick flash transition at the beginning of this scene, emphasising the passage of time when there is little for the trio to do in the projects, until a news van pulls up above them badgering the group for an interview.

This scene can also be seen as reflective of the theme of poverty, as well as power. The news van is framed from a low angle, immediately connoting their dominance over the characters below. The media here is keeping their distance, apathetic to the people literally lower than them. It’s an ‘us and them’ philosophy made spatially on the screen, with fences between the two parties separating them. Even as they are spoken to by the female news reporter, the cameraman alongside her is filming their every action, lending her words more hostility and invasiveness than if she were alone. They are constantly being manipulated here, as they are helpless to being filmed from above; a place of safety for the news van. She assumes they have taken part in a riot, endorsing the typical stereotype of the underclass.

The irony of this moment is that while communicating with the underclass and attempting politeness, the media increases the distance between themselves and this group by needlessly keeping away and instead perpetuating a symbolic distance between the two, reflective of the real-life mainstream French media’s distrust of youth culture and the estates on which our main characters live. It is perhaps representing the media in this way because they have shown in the past their disregard for minorities and at times blatant hatred for the ‘non-French’. TV host Pascal Sevran famously went unpunished for a racist tirade in his autobiography, saying that “"The cock of the blacks is responsible for the famine in Africa” and that “It would be necessary to sterilise half the planet." That Sevran is encouraged to continue by going unpunished shows that the media openly endorses these sorts of views, and it is no wonder that La Haine’s main characters view this female journalist in such a light. This context grounds the film in a realistic and recognisable scenario, making the entire scene all the more effective and sinister, as with much of the rest of the film. 

Another instance of this power structure in terms of class and reinforced stereotypes can be found in a later scene set in an art gallery in central Paris. In the art gallery, Vinz, Hubert and Said are constantly looked down upon by the middle classes enjoying the modern art on display, seeing in the gallery no sort of enjoyment. As well as in communicating with two more middle-class women, the group cannot engage on that level, perhaps due to their own lack of education. This frustrates and embarrasses them and creates anger in the group, resulting in their being thrown out of the establishment. Excusing the group as they have left the building, the older man who has thrown them out says “From the estate.” This phrase enforces the dominant ideology in the middle classes that those from the estates are typically angry, violent, jobless and rowdy. And the room believes this stereotype, because the trio have just reinforced this just now and with the riot the night before these events capturing the public’s attention.

This grounded, realistic representation of people and places in La Haine is a far-cry from the stylised, vibrant underbelly of Rio’s shanty towns in the film City of God. Described as ‘the Brazillian Goodfellas’ it is immediately noticeable that this film won’t be as realistic or as grounded in reality as La Haine, following instead the tried-and-tested formula of ‘rags to riches’ gangster genre films so prevalent in the last thirty years. 

This can be found particularly in City of God’s use of montage, the way in which the film condenses the ‘rise to power’ stories of its individual characters Blacky and Lil Ze into less than a minute of film. “The Story of the Apartment” is one of these montages, showing the transition of power over time and demonstrating how quickly power is established in the favela – all centred on the ownership of one apartment over time. This is a single shot, stylised unlike La Haine’s mostly stagnant, grounded cinematography. The same framing is used throughout the montage, a collection of scenes which fade into each other in chronological order, showing each new owner hand over power to someone else as main character Rocket narrates and explains. This montage draws attention to the idea that each territory in the favela is expendable and contested over, and in a more realistic sense it suggests that there is a cycle to the illegal activity occurring within Rio’s favelas. While incredibly stylised, this does suggest there is a surface-layer of realism underpinning the more conventional elements of City of God.

Another of these montages has Lil Ze and his gang taking over different territories to increase their control and power over the favela. This montage, like the aforementioned apartment montage, is the same framing and style of shot looking down on Ze and his gang, each time moving into view and shooting unnamed characters dead as Rocket narrates. Again, this scene comments upon the transition of power in the favela and how easily this can be accomplished, as if it happens most days. It’s a literal quick transition as well, as the gang’s movement speed is increased as if skipping through a video tape. There is a definite sense this is a past event, reinforced by Rocket’s past-tense narration.

One scene reflecting the then-modern French power structure and the theme of poverty in La Haine is in the comparison of one scene and another, one featuring the character Vinz watching a boxing match and another scene mentioned earlier with the trio visiting an art gallery, walking amongst the arty, hip middle-class. It’s clear from his familiarity with another patron of the boxing match and its modest set-up that Vinz is ‘accepted’ by this environment; however this is not the case in the art gallery. It’s a blood sport and something typically enjoyed by the lower classes; it is seen not as art and as much less cultured, contributing to the contrast between the two settings and their comfort to our main characters. There is a clear line between classes in this film, segregating them by the stereotypical topics of interest. In this case, it’s boxing versus art. However simplistic this may seem, these locations are represented fairly by director Mathieu Kassovitz, accurately depicting these scenarios and remaining faithful to real-life Paris.

A later scene perfectly demonstrates this segregation, as the trio of characters sit atop a roof looking into the distance at the famous Eiffel Tower in the background. To the underclass, the tower is just iconography, because what an outsider to the country would extrapolate from the imagery is images of romance and revolution, but they take nothing away from it. In fact, it just connotes the distance between their lives and the lives of central Parisians. The tower is a part of this unattainable lifestyle for the trio who may never escape their lives in the projects.

City of God on the other hand presents a view of poverty that is entirely incidental to its setting in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. Violent crime and the abuse and transition of power is focused upon far more than the subject of wealth, this theme utilised more as window-dressing against a film more concerned by the gangs and lifestyle of the shanty town dwellers. It is a cosmetic view of poverty compared with La Haine’s subtlety of ‘showing it like it is’ on the streets of Paris and its outskirts, especially compared with City of God’s penchant for stylised, visceral cinematography.

La Haine’s opening title sequence immediately establishes a conflict in French society, reflecting the real life tensions throughout the 20^th century between those in power and those without it, be they working class, underclass or ethnic minorities. The riots portrayed in this scene are real, taken from archived footage of riots from the 1980s and early ‘90s, reinforcing the film’s realistic and authentic portrayal of this conflict and French society as a whole. Violence, police brutality and fire are seen in this footage, performed by the faceless police forces battling protestors and rioters on the streets. That the police, compared with the citizens on the opposing side, do not show their faces, dress in black and act as one overwhelming group is suggestive of their inhumanity to much of France’s working and underclass. They aren’t to be trusted, they are dishonest and they carry the same single reckless and violent ideology. While the citizens fighting against them are individuals, the police are a collective, making them the group with the power both here and at large.

The stock footage sets up the realist framework for the rest of the fictitious film, the audience instantly recognising that in Kassovitz’s film the police are to be feared, forming the film’s anti-establishment message from the very start. ‘Burnin’ & Lootin’, a song by Bob Marley and the Wailers, plays over this footage and connotes in its lyrics such as ‘they were all dressed in uniforms of brutality/how many rivers do we have to cross/before we can talk to the boss?” the anti-establishment messages and questioning of social structures of which Marley was famous for. All of these factors contribute to the director’s ideology, alongside many in France, that the police are dangerous and do much harm to innocent people, especially in light of race-incited crimes committed by the police which have gone unpunished.

The film’s opening scene also inspires this same look at conflict, spatially dividing the character Said and the militant French police. Again, these police officers appear uniform and threatening, holding vicious dogs by the leash. And again, it’s an ‘us vs. them’ mentality created spatially on the screen. Children run by between the two as if this kind of image happens regularly and doesn’t interrupt their routine of play. A scene in the first third of the film continues this trend, as the police confront the youth of the estate upon a dilapidated rooftop. The police positioned in foreground emphasise that in this setting they are outnumbered and vulnerable, and that there is a class war as well, inferred by the line “Is that the only thing they taught you at Notre Dame?” Both sides are framed on either side of the frame and their differences are stressed not only in this way, but also in their costume.

City of God is a film in three acts, not unlike many others. Yet this three act structure acts more similar to an episodic structure, each act focusing more on specific characters. These are also clearly signposted through captions during the film, like episode titles, informing the audience upon which characters or groups this act will primarily follow. This is also, in effect, similar to the structure of La Haine. La Haine is divided into sixteen different parts, each corresponding to a stretch of time within twenty-four hours at different times of day. These sections are also signposted with white on black captions and a ticking clock sound effect, counting down inevitably to the death of character Vinz. Time is communicated in City of God through captions such as these, indicating the decade of each act, and also the mise-en-scene of the favela itself, growing in size and bleakness as the decades continue.

 

Circular narratives or narratives which effectively repeat their openings in their conclusions are also important parts of both City of God and La Haine, the latter utilising this narrative device to comment upon the cycle of violence and unending conflict between ethnicities and classes in French society. This is to say that this film is cautionary, acting as a warning that as long as this conflict persists that this narrative will continue again and again, but with different people. These are issues that are ongoing and La Haine reinforces this through the shooting of a ‘non-French’ citizen at the beginning and ending of the film, also emphasising the inevitability of such shootings, which are purported to happen on a daily basis in modern France.  The narrative time here is important for this very reason, taking place over twenty-four hours to emphasise this point as well as the boredom and tedium of the estate youths. City of God utilises this circular narrative to discuss the idea that Lil Ze’s death isn’t the end of violent crime in the favela, as ‘the runts’ of the favela quickly take on his role as crime lord. The events if the film may seem huge and important to us, but they are in reality quite small and insignificant in the context of necessary wider change. The circular narrative emphasises that Lil Ze is just another criminal, and so are these ‘runts’ who will likely follow the same path as this character.

La Haine, while unconventional in its division of scenes, is rather conventional in its linear and continuous narrative structure. City of God, on the other hand, adopts a non-linear disruptive narrative. This unconventional structure emphasises the stylised nature of the film as a more generic crime film than La Haine’s social realism. City of God does not take itself entirely seriously, relishing montages of hyper-violent situations and moments of action-movie set-pieces, and this is reinforced through the structure of the film by jumping from different moments in time to take a detour from the continuous narrative of Rocket’s story (who also narrates these detours). La Haine simply abides by its “realist framework” introduced by the film’s opening title sequence, flowing continuously from A to Z as if the events were happening in real-time.

La Haine, it seems, displays much more reverence for the representation of the people and places of its subject, whereas City of God presents a somewhat cosmetic attitude to these people and places. This does not discredit the film’s quality however, simply that one film is much more stylised than another.