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(Ulrich Tukur) and an Italian Catholic priest, Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassovitz). Gerstein was an actual participant in the Zyklon B death campaigns of the Third Reich, but tried to stall efforts and to report this evil to ministers and the Vatican, hence, becoming a spy for God. Fontana is Hochhuth's fictional guise for Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan friar and ‘Inmate No. 16670’ of Auschwitz, to whom the play was dedicated. For hiding Jews in his monastery, Gestapo agents arrested Kolbe and transported him to Auschwitz. When a prisoner escaped
persistence of a militant heritage still visible in that space? Le Roux takes care to avoid two possible clichés: first, the over-symbolisation of the red suburbs, the trap of a suburban Ostalgie;13 second, the cliché of the suburbs as source of 205 206 Screening the Paris suburbs fear or menace, such as those regularly seen ablaze on the news at the time, and of which La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) is the contemporaneous cinematic symbol.14 Just seconds into the film, the camera moves around the streets of Saint-Ouen searching for traces of the old days: ‘We went
Long before the emergence in the 1990s of a ‘cinéma de banlieue’ on the heels of Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), French filmmakers looked beyond the gates of the French capital for inspiration and content. In the Paris suburbs, they found a vast reservoir of architectural forms, landscapes and contemporary social types in which to anchor their fictions. From the villas and vacant lots of silent serials of the 1910s and the bucolic riverside guinguettes of 1930s poetic realism, to the housing estates and motorways of the second post-war, the suburban landscape came to form a privileged site in the French cinematographic imaginary. In keeping with directorial vision, the prerogatives of the film industry or the internal demands of genre, the suburb could be made to impart a strong impression of reality or unreality, novelty or ordinariness, danger or enjoyment. The contributors to this volume argue collectively for a long history of the suburban imaginary by contrasting diverse ‘structures of feeling’ (Raymond Williams) that correlate to divergent aesthetic and ideological programmes. Commenting on narrative, documentary and essay films, they address such themes as class conflict, leisure, boredom, violence and anti-authoritarianism, underscoring the broader function of the suburb as a site of intense cultural productivity.
Introduction Philippe Met and Derek Schilling On the heels of the international hit La Haine (Hate, Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), France at the close of the millennium saw a spate of bold, self-styled ‘hood’ films set in suburban council estates that critics were prompt to name – justifiably so – ‘films de banlieue’ (Jousse 1995; Vincendeau 2000). Heralded by the groundbreaking yet overlooked Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (Mehdi Charef, 1985) and illustrated by such features as Douce France (Malik Chibane, 1995), État des lieux (Jean-François Richet, 1995) and Wesh
action movies. Pre-sales world-wide and clever marketing strategies meant that Gaumont had recouped its outlay before shooting even began. 10 First-day release figures in France alone were a staggering 300 thousand spectators. And for all that one might criticise Besson for his extravagance, the fact remains that thanks to the profitability of his work, Gaumont can finance more risky ventures (such as a new Mathieu Kassovitz film, Déjà vu 11 )and
tomber By the side of a highway outside Paris, in the oppressive grey of dusk, a childlike young man appears, as if from nowhere, next to a middle-aged hitchhiker and refuses to leave. From this moment on the young man, Johnny (aka Freddy (Mathieu Kassovitz)), becomes obsessed with the older one, Marx (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who reluctantly falls into a pseudo-paternal role
several episodes of the television series Le Bureau des Légendes (2020), starring Mathieu Kassovitz, at the time of this book’s completion. 6 However, it is for the eight feature films he has directed so far that Jacques Audiard is best known. These began with 1994’s Regarde les hommes tomber ( See How They Fall ), a subversive neo- noir shaped
that do not share both characteristics, such as La Faute à Voltaire (2001), a beur film set in inner Paris and filmed by the Franco-Maghrebin Abdellatif Kechiche, or La Haine (1995), a banlieue film set in an HLM but directed by white French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz. Films from these cinéma de banlieue and cinéma beur movements, with their ‘thematisations of imposed exile’ (Bloom 2006: 133), often feature (albeit brief) excerpts of typically migrant languages such as Arabic and, in the twenty-first century, Bambara, Berber and other African languages. None of
in Métisse (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1993), J’ai pas sommeil (Claire Denis, 1994), La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995), Etat des lieux (Jean-François Richet, 1995), En avoir (ou pas) (Laetitia Masson, 1995), N’oublie-pas que tu vas mourir (Xavier Beauvois, 1995), A toute vitesse (Gaël Morel, 1996), Chacun cherche son chat (Cédric Klapisch, 1996), Les Trois Frères (Les Inconnus, 1996) and Les Deux Papas et la maman (Smaïn et Longwal
history is made. In Rushdie's Midnight's Children ( 1981 ), his narrator-protagonist's self-obsessed account of India's history presents an extreme form of subjectivity that poses questions about historical objectivity; how can we disentangle the personal from the political? Here, literature seeks to disrupt, rather than simply reflect, the real world. Creative interruptions can also expose the risible pomposity, racism and classism of the arts establishment, as, for example, in Mathieu Kassovitz's film La Haine (1995), where three young working-class men of