La Haine opening sequence

The films opens up with a single man up against a wall of police in riot gear, this single citizen on his own makes him look vulnerable and heroic whilst the police look cowardly and brutalizers. What the man says is significant as it paints the police as cold hearted brutes as he says “you murderers! It’s easy to gun us down! We only got rocks!” This makes the police look like a group of heartless killers who kill because they know that they have power while the citizens do not. The opening dedications after the single man and the police reinforce the image of the police being the enemy, by saying ‘while it was in the making’ it implies that the issue is still on going and is still prevalent. When Hubert tells the story of the man who fell of a skyscraper he says that the man says ‘so far so good…’ which is a metaphor for society as Hubert believes society is in free fall and it is waiting for a landing, the cycle of conflict is the free fall and Hubert says that it is only a matter of time before society ‘hits the ground’. He suggests that the crisis will end by how is up to the target audience, which are the French citizens.

As Hubert is speaking a Molotov goes flying towards an image of the earth, the Molotov is a well-known symbol of freedom fighting and connotes revolution. The protesters are shown to be peaceful and dancing while the police are setting up armour for their vehicles and getting riot gear, this shows the police as the instigators of the conflict. Visually, this shot prepares us for an angry, negative and destructive world view from the characters. This display of opposites is further shown as the scene cuts to a policeman throwing an object into a crowd of civilians, this further enforces the police as the instigators of the conflict.

A P.O.V from the police’s perspective is shown; here they are shown as a single and faceless brute force. This dehumanizes the police and makes the audience loose sympathy for them and gain more sympathy for the citizens, presenting them as more vulnerable and more victim like. Conflict is even presented in the credits in the opening; this is because they are placed into separate categories in the credits. This is done in order to show the conflict between the projects, the city and the police on a subconscious level. The introduction of the real police brutality connects the reality to the fiction and presents it in a realist framework.

The non-diegetic music from Bob Marley is important as the lyrics link to the conflict that is presented to the audience. The lyric ‘could not recognise the faces standing over me; they were all dressed in uniforms of brutality’ further enforces the police as a faceless brute force, this dehumanizes the police further and further removes sympathy for them. The lyric ‘how many rivers do we have to cross, before we can talk to the boss?’ is a comment on the cycle of violence, it asks how many conflicts and riots do the French citizens have to have until their voices are heard. The lyric ‘let the Roots Man take a blow. All them drugs are gonna make you slow now; it’s not the music of the ghetto’ is meant to comment on how the police see the people of the projects as slow and useless, however this is a stereotype or a ‘Root Man’ and is not what they are really like or it is ‘not the music of the ghetto’.

Transitioning from the real riot footage to the fictional film is a fake news report on a man named Abdel; this man is not real and is just a character created by the director to transition between reality and fiction. This was done in order to show the fictional world as the real one and link the two further. Cutting to the fictional new report about Abdel with “burnin & lootin” still playing helps to transfer the reality of the riot footage to that of the fictional world. The music changing from non-diegetic to diegetic when Saïd appears is done to make the fictional world look like the night after the riots, even though the footage that was shown was over the span of several years. The opening was designed to make the police appear as the enemy and the citizens as victims intentionally, the director openly admitted that “La Haine is an anti-police film and that is how I meant it to be understood’. This means that the intention of the opening as a whole was to present the police as the antagonist.