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4 The banlieue in French cinema of the 1930s Keith Reader La banlieue est multiple. Le film de banlieue ne constitue pas un genre. Il n’a ni règles, ni codes. Il se définit par un décor, un climat, c’est un cinéma de situations.1 (Narvalo 1981: 3) The above was written, in a magazine published by the Maison Populaire de Montreuil, well before the cinéma de banlieue symptomatised by La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) emerged as a genre in its own right. Films de banlieue, indeed, have a history almost as long as that of cinema itself, as Annie Fourcaut notes in
facelessness of Christiane? Long before Série noire (Alain Corneau, 1979) or La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), Franju had put his finger on the pulse of a type of suburban despair which was still just emerging. Of course, it is far-fetched to imagine that Franju intended such things as Christiane’s lack of a face as a literal, specific metaphor for suburban anomie.5 It is more likely that such connections are made possible by Franju’s sensitivity to a more general trend identified by David Leyval, namely the process by which the banlieue is made up of ‘everything the city
author, wrote the screenplay adaptation of his own novel, Léviathan (1962). Contemporary French literary authors frequently construct film versions of their own works. Jean-Christophe Grangé co-wrote with director Mathieu Kassovitz the screenplay adaptation of his popular novel, Les Rivières poupres (2000), which made forty million dollars in profits at the box office globally. Clearly, French cultural infatuation with film and its authors’ pursuit of new expression in the visual medium offer a sound historical basis for this project. Theoretical concerns about the
dominant cinema or to the more subjective expressions of concern about the identity of second- generation Maghrebi immigrants, voiced in the handful of films of the 1980s known as cinéma beur (discussed in chapter 1 ). In the mid-1990s, however, Mathieu Kassovitz’ stunningly inventive second film, La Haine , with its central black-beur-blanc trio of unemployed youths, brought the representation of the banlieue and the fracture sociale (the increasing disparity between
), and Anita and Me (Metin Hüseyin, 2002) constitute institutional, industrial and ideological models which Ae Fond Kiss can be seen as reacting to in a variety of ways. Casting the net more widely, we could also point to other prominent European and American films about the multicultural condition – such a list would include Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) and Jungle Fever (1992), the German-Turkish/Turkish-German films of Fatih Akin, or French beur-themed films such as La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), to name just a few. As we have seen in the funding
a provocative rejection of the concerns animating the wider community of contemporary French filmmakers. The 1990s in France saw the emergence of a trend of cinéma engagé of the social realist type, dealing with problems of urban violence, social dispossession and ethnic marginalization in France. Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995) and Erick Zonca’s La Vie revée des anges (1998) are probably
. 5 ‘The rules of a game that suits the dominant class’ 6 ‘the last Marxist film’ 7 To a certain degree, the film also reflects concerns about current tensions in French society. Chabrol has said that La Cérémonie predicts an imminent implosion while Mathieu Kassovitz’s
. Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur), about the death chambers he has seen in the concentration camps fails to persuade anyone at the Vatican to act – all except for Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassovitz), a young priest who becomes equally passionate in his advocacy, and equally, though separately, doomed in his attempt. Because ‘[t]he director himself finds it “hard to offer solutions” when it comes to political – or cinematic – issues’, Costa-Gavras answers a question about ‘cinema as a tool of social change’ by identifying a more modest goal: ‘Film should serve as a mirror
. Although Audiard has always worked with major rising and established actors in the French scene, Cotillard brings a transnational profile that is more aligned with that of a Hollywood star than those of mainstay Audiard leads such as Mathieu Kassovitz or the previously unknown Tahar Rahim. Cotillard’s performance greatly contributed to De rouille et d’os ’s success on the awards circuit, as well
Haine (1996) by Mathieu Kassovitz. The politics of Durassian cinema, on the other hand, consists precisely in her blending of differences, as she juxtaposes an immigrant workers’ ghetto with Western classical music and thus metaphorically dissolves the barriers of class, culture and ethnicity. Her cinema, then, functions as a melting pot, since she uses sound and image to bring together a variety of cultural influences and experiences. Her