“In what ways can both your focus films be considered typical of their genre?”

“In what ways can both your focus films be considered typical of their genre?”

City of God and La Haine both differ with how they use the generic conventions of the crime genre to get their point across.

La Haine for one uses many of the conventions to challenge the dominant ideologies of France and Paris specifically while City of God obeys many of these conventions.  

The first convention used is highlighting the life of a crime figure or a crime victim and in this case, this can come down to opinion. Some would say the three characters are criminals, others including myself would argue that it is not them who are the criminals, in fact they are the victims of crime committed by the police. A specific scene for this is the torture scene where two police officers who take Houbert and Said to the police station when they have done nothing wrong and then strap them to a chair and begin to teach a young rookie police officer how to torture. This in turns breeds the hate that the citizens of the products have for the police, as shown in the film 'Hate breeds hate'.  In City of God Lil ze is highlighted as a power hungry out of control criminal, following the convention. 

Another convention is the use of real life issues and headline grabbing situations. For example in La Haine the projects, racial segregation, police brutality and Paris riots are all real life issues, this films aim is to show the bad side of Paris by using this and many conventions to challenge the dominant ideology portrayed by French media. While in City of God it attempts to inform us of the poverty stricken favelas and the dangers that these bring including violence and drug trafficking. 

The convention of large cities providing a view of a criminal underworld is once again only prominant in one of our films which is City of God where we see set in Rio and the criminal underworld of Cidade de Deus (City of God). While in La Haine we are set outside of Paris in the projects and even though they visit Paris and a good chunk is filmed there the message is not meant for Paris, but rather about the projects. 

Another convention is that the film gangsters are usually materialistic, street smart, immoral, meglo maniacal and self destructive. All these qualities are shown by Lil Ze in City of God as he is obsessed with his money, he knows how to manipulate, is immoral in the amount of innocent people he kills, meglo-maniacal in that he is simply power crazy and self destructive as he kills that many people that his past eventually catches up and is killed. In La Haine our three characters are certainly self destructive as their hate for the police and Vinz search to kill a police officer ends up in a police officer killing him, as said in the film 'Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good... so far so good... so far so good.Its not the fall that kills, its the landing'.

In City of God the rivalry between Lil Ze and the other drug dealers is hardly threatening, just the odd trouble but when the feud with Knockout Ned begins this drives to plot forward and becomes a significant plot characteristic with everything being centered around this on going war. This is also prominent in La Haine with the hate and feud the youths from the projects have with the police that is ongoing throughout the narrative and is the focal point of everything that happens such as the death of Abdel, torture of Said and Houbert and death of Vinz.