Hip-Hop Aesthetics and La Haine

L A HAINE (D IRECTED BY MATH I EU K ASSOVITZ, 1995, LE STU DIO C ANAL+), FRAM E GRAB . Studying le hip hop in a hardscrabble increasingly autonomous. 2 French French neighborhood at the turn of artistic practices are often quite the century, dancer and professor distinct from those of their American Hip-Hop Felicia McCarren discovered an cousins. However, le hip hop also almost dialectical tension: honors its roots in New York City in Aesthetics the late 1970s, within the aesthetic Even in class, there is a kind of system created and nurtured by rage in the form: some of the African-diaspora youth in America. and La moves are outrageous. We are In dance, for example, these debts taught to move frenetically, not are expressed not just through just to the beat. We learn to crawl the (seeming) contradiction of Haine on the floor and skim over it “outrageous” moves pursued with backwards. We all try to spin on discipline and extraordinary skill, our heads. But these moves are but also through a preference for Steve Spence all at the service of a performance the aerial. McCarren notes that this that is disciplined, skill that is Africanism manifests itself in the acquired, and dancing that is emphasis on upward movements not only for oneself but also for during the initial, “top-rock” stages of others. It is not jazzercise and a hip-hop performance, so that feet it is not gym; it is a dance class 3 1 seem barely to touch the ground. with a recognizable format. And it is most clear in the form’s As McCarren and many others “air moves” and “power moves,” have noted, le hip hop’s artists including its distinctive head spins and interpretive communities are and windmills. By defying gravity in thriving, multi-generational, and this way, hip-hop dancers are making gestural statements about the 96 liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven radical possibilities of life within the worlds in which they find themselves. France’s hip-hopeurs have developed a movement vocabulary that is rooted in U.S. models, and in rage, but that is bound by neither. Though still very much an art form of the dispossessed, McCarren writes, “… this dance has come to speak about other things: to figure its dancers as something or someone else….”4 In this essay, I examine another artistic statement with a similar project: the brutal, elegant, and widely celebrated film La Haine, directed by Matthieu Kassovitz and released in 1995. As I demonstrate, the parallel sensibilities that link La Haine to le hip hop are no coincidence. In ways that have not been fully appreciated, La Haine is a hip-hop film. At the level of mise-en-scène, of FIGURE 1. B- BOYS DANCING IN A WRECK ED TRAIN STATIO N IN L A HAINE (D IRECTED BY MATH I EU K ASSOVITZ, course, few could miss La Haine’s 1995, LE STU DIO C ANAL+), FRAM E GRAB . passion for hip-hop. Shot on location liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven 97 Hip Hop Aesthetics in a working-class suburb of Paris, Marseilles. Like many inner cities “to shock the film showcases the artistry of in the U.S., the banlieues are home the neighborhood’s graffiti writers to Black and Brown communities and b-boys, and it also includes of the African diaspora—most with and to a cameo performance by DJ Cut roots in former French colonies in Killer (Anouar Hajoui), a renowned the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, please” offers Parisian DJ. For a great many critics, and the Antilles.6 And while white however, hip-hop’s appearances supremacy and anti-black racism of a useful serve at best as evidence of the film’s course have distinct histories and ethnographic impulse or, worse, of manifestations in France, in some Kassovitz’s efforts to tart up the cases their workings are grimly summary story with imposed signifiers of an familiar: as are many U.S. cities, the Americanized, commodity culture.5 banlieues are plagued by ongoing of the aims police violence.7 What are called In both cases, La Haine’s ostentatious police bauvres (blunders) routinely style poses a problem. Although the cause serious injuries and deaths of hip-hop film flouts the codes of journalistic among banlieue residents, and La realism, La Haine clearly shares a Haine was conceived specifically as aesthetics mission with the wave of TV exposés an indictment of both this violence and “sociological” films that preceded and public indifference toward its and followed its 1995 release. persistence.8 Kassovitz asserts Its makers framed La Haine as a that he began the script in 1993, “message film”—a stark examination on the day that police shot and of contemporary life in France’s killed a 17-year-old Zairian, Makomé embattled banlieues, the suburbs M’Bowole, while he was handcuffed that ring major cities like Paris and to a radiator in a police station 98 liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven Hip Hop Aesthetics house. M’Bowole had been arrested 1960s the banlieues have served from it.”11 Unlike its sociological on suspicion of stealing cigarettes. as backdrops for the experimental contemporaries, Vincendeau notes, The film’s narrative culminates in a and highly personal work of many “…La Haine is polished and seductive. similar bauvre, and its fictional story French auteurs, including, for It aims to shock and please….”12 is framed by a complex set of devices example, Deux ou trois choses que that undergird the film’s claims to je sais d’elle (Jean-Luc Godard, As it happens, “to shock and to realism. The narrative’s opening 1966) and Le Camion (Marguerite please” offers a useful summary shot, for example, is preceded by Duras, 1977).9 Many reviewers within of the aims of hip-hop aesthetics, an intertitle—spare, plain text on a France’s cinematic establishment evident in the outrageous moves black background, with no music— drew similar comparisons. Cahiers du of b-boys and b-girls as well as the that dedicates La Haine “to those Cinema, no fan of the “sociological,” smooth flow of hardcore rappers. who died while this film was being praised Kassovitz for his ability Hip-hop artists rarely feel a need made.” A similar title card follows to “escape naturalism,” and Le to choose between commitments the final shot, thanking the residents Nouvel Observateur compared La to form and commitments to of the cité (public housing project) Haine favorably with A bout de realism. “So many people can’t in which La Haine was filmed. soufflé (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960).10 see,” the U.S. artist Jay-Z observes, As this suggests, the filmmakers Vincendeau argues that La Haine “that every great rapper is not just a documentarian but [also] a presented La Haine as an exposé deviates from the “dreary” and 13 on life and death in Paris’s trouble “rough” form of contemporary trickster.” As Will Higbee notes, banlieues, and French audiences sociological films, and therefore, during the 1980s and early 1990s embraced this claim to realism. should be understood as a hybrid: Kassovitz immersed himself in “From the ‘sociological’ films it Paris’s emerging hip-hop scenes, Nevertheless, La Haine’s flamboyant takes a genuine interest in the and their influence is quite evident in style seems to point in other the soundtracks of his early shorts working-class suburb as setting 14 directions. Ginette Vincendeau, and topic, and from the ‘aesthetic’ and his first feature film. By 1993, for example, notes that since the films a stylistic distanciation when he began work on La Haine, liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven 99 Hip Hop Aesthetics the 26-year-old director was already never fully anywhere. It never tension, which is reinforced by the fluent in hip-hop forms and the lands. It hovers. — Eric Hayes15 voiceover joke, told by Hubert: possibilities that they offered for cinema. In sum, then, the best models La Haine’s narrative is framed by It’s the story of a guy who falls for La Haine’s complex form are a joke, told in voiceover, about a off a skyscraper. On the way not to be found in the traditions of man in free-fall. The device signals down past each floor, he keeps French auteurism. A better guide is a larger truth about the narrative: it telling himself, ‘So far so good; La Haine itself, which highlights hip- exists in a moment of suspension, so far so good; so far so good.’ in spaces of relative calm that are hop artistry in its content precisely Hubert repeats the joke midway pregnant with the possibilities of in order to pay homage to its most through the film, and it appears violence. The film’s story begins on important formal influence. In what a final time in voiceover during the morning after an uprising has follows, I investigate two intertwined the film’s concluding scene, after engulfed a cité in Chanteloup-les- ways that hip-hop’s formal the police have shot Vinz in the Vignes, a banlieue located northwest system contributes to La Haine’s head, and as Hubert confronts his of Paris. It ends in another spasm of achievements: in the kinetic beauty killer. Each time, Hubert follows violence. In between, La Haine follows embodied by its camerawork, and in the punch line with a dénouement: 24 hours in the lives of three young its densely layered intertextuality. “But it’s not how you fall that friends from the cité: Hubert, Saïd, matters.

Load more