La Haine

Outstanding as both a narrative film and as a historical document and text, something very few films achieve.

Even as the film critiques bourgeois understandings of film, art, and entertainment, it draws on arthouse filmmaking, a historically elitist subset of cinema. Through this contradiction, I think it hopes to question our understandings of what constitutes "good art". This even plays out in the film — the film focuses on both graffiti across the banlieue and art in art galleries and asks us: why must a painting hung in a gallery deserve more praise than a piece of street art? What if graffiti can fulfill the tasks of art just as well as a Rothko? After watching this film, I'd argue that graffiti is art and should be understood not as a mark of criminality or deviance, but as a contestation of the rules instituted by those in power. The film posits that perhaps what we understand as "good art" should be deeply interrogated.

In fact, the fact that this is even a film is highly contradictory. After all, French bourgeois society in the aftermath of the wars in Vietnam and Algeria attempted to "forget" these defeats by making consumerism a religion that masked the empire's past atrocities. In this consumerist society, film and cinema were seen as leisure activities that were reserved for wealthy individuals. This is a film that boldly uses the same medium intended to provide pleasure and fun to the French elite to illuminate the legacies of colonization that scaffolded those very moments of pleasure. As a historical text, La Haine's contradictions speak volumes.

"the world is ours" -- this was beautiful.

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Rewatched again for a history course on French imperialism and Islam. Below is a discussion board post I wrote for this film.

This was my third viewing of La Haine. I tried to update my previous understanding of the film with the information we learned in class, especially over the past few weeks. After my first viewing, I was reminded of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and his thoughts on the role of violence in decolonizing efforts. I remember thinking to myself that the film asked the audience to ponder, "Is 'an eye for an eye' a justified principle in decolonial revolutions?" I don't think the film ever gave a clear answer to this, and after my third viewing, I am certain it doesn't, but I think the answer to the question isn't the point of the question. I think the point of the question is to provoke a conversation about how French colonial violence doesn't simply "disappear" through some sort of cultural amnesia. We see Said and Hubert being interrogated by the police in a manner perhaps similar to that of the French during the Algerian War. There is also the scene of the trio brutally beating the skinheads in Paris immediately after they are let go by the police. Perhaps the film suggests that violence ultimately mutates and reappears in the residue of colonial domination that French historical memory has attempted to conceal. 

Although I think questions of violence, police brutality, and racial subordination form the crux of the film, I also think questions of patriarchy and masculinity play crucial roles that may not get enough attention at first glance. The film suggests that masculinity in postcolonial France is wrapped up in a cruel contradiction: that racially coded men are expected to perform patriarchal ideals of toughness, dominance, and control even as the police and carceral apparatus systematically denies them any form of social power in the public arena. We learned in class how colonized men were historically perceived to be deviant, perverted, backward, and uncivilized by figures like Volney. This same idea reappears in La Haine as well in the way the police assume they are justified to torture Said and Hubert, debilitate Abdel and leave him hospitalized, or demand that the men leave the rooftop without any warrant. In the interrogation scene, especially, the police's strategies have a sadistic quality to them as they both terrorize Said and Hubert and attempt to teach the new police officer these strategies. Here, the dialectic between the police and the racialized men is rooted in a state-sanctioned form of masculinity that is reproduced and grounded in the subjugation, intimidation, and control over bodies indexed as racially other, which echoes the constructions of masculinity and patriarchy that were weaponized once by French authorities to justify the domination of colonized subjects.

I also think Vinz's re-enactment of Travis Blike from Taxi Driver in his mirror provides additional evidence to support the claim that patriarchy and masculinity are central to the film. In the Lacanian sense, the mirror stage marks the moment when the subject identifies with an external image of themselves that is assumed to be full and coherent and subsequently begins to build an ego around that image. However, Lacan argues that this identification is ultimately a mis-identification, because the self is never truly a coherently unified, yet the subject constructs the ego by viewing themselves through an image in the mirror that is assumed to be complete, true, and real. In other words, the ego, through the mirror stage, is founded upon an illusory understanding of the self. This idea maps onto Vinz in this scene of him in the mirror as well. By re-enacting Travis Blike, Vinz attempts to construct his ego by performing a version of masculinity that is tough, violent, untouchable, and powerful (or, what Lacan might call the imago -- an idealized masculinity that is external to the self), which compensates for his powerlessness and dispossessed position in French society. To phrase it more pointedly, the stereotype of the "strong man" in French society becomes the ideal ego for Vinz through this mirror scene, but only becomes so at the cost of his own self, and leaves him even more trapped in the fantasy that masculinity must be organized around violence, brutality, and domination.