La Haine Scene Essay

How do the elements of the mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing and sound, and the structure of the narrative create meaning and generate audience response in the sequence? ’12:43’; the perpetual progression of time is met with social paralysis, the motionless camera shot: Hubert, Vinz and Said sat stooped and silent; an unnatural regression into a cheerless children’s park, a futile claim to a phantom innocence lost to a state in decay; snubbed and shamed by the suffering of despairing youth. A strained half minute camera shot is dedicated entirely to the stillness of the three protagonists; the silence as no dialogue is uttered between them. The wasting boredom consuming the youth is suddenly incredibly tangible to the audience in the lack of motion and drooped heads staring blankly down at the ground; a hard, substantial ground more palpable than looking forward to any ghost of a future. The mise-en-scene of this part of the scene is dulled by a lack of vibrancy; a greyness that overwhelms the three figures crouched in the dust of the deadened park. Their clothes are drab, the houses that look down into the park are generic and reflective of the large, dismal housing estates built at the time. Hubert is physically inside the mouth of the slide, a giant hippo, creating a terrible feeling of foreboding in the audience as if he is about to be swallowed into a world caught in a wasted revolution; ‘the price paid for happiness tomorrow: injustice oppression and misery today’. As the camera, subsequently zooms out, the frame is filled with the reduction of the boys in the physical demotion of the park from the rest of the street, their lack of power, surrounded by bars as in a prison or a zoo; ‘thiory’. The three teenagers are directionless, trapped in their lives as they are caged into the park; a wretched exhibition to be viewed by a disinterested world. A very deliberate piece of editing then suddenly arouses Hubert, Vinz and Said from their desolate lethargy when the scene is cut and the camera immediately zooms in to capture the first fragment of speech. An employment of a sound effect mimicking a fast forward after a great period of time has elapsed occurs simultaneously implying, to the audience, the vast and tedious periods of boredom and monotony experienced by the three boys.

As a news crew drive forward in the back of the frame, the shot captures two binary opposites: static and motion. The dreadful juxtaposition of the luxurious mobility of the news crew with the hopeless stasis of Hubert, Vinz and Said. As the news crew reverses back to film the boys, the camera shots switch, in quick succession, from the boys’ point of view to the point of view of the news crew portrayed in the shot being framed by the outline of a camera lens. An overlapping of dialogue then ensues; the aggression of the boys, manifest in their shouting, begins to sound like an awful imitation of apes at a zoo. The camera zooms in on the three boys as they pack together as though cornered. This disorder of sound and shot impresses a sense of confusion upon the audience; they do not wish to criminalise the youths but seen, from the point of perception of the news crew, they are just animals, jumping up and down and throwing stones. They shout ironically ‘Do we look like thugs?’. It is an incredibly distressing scene as unbeknowingly the boys are fulfilling an appalling social perception of themselves however unlike ‘thugs’ the boys act more like animals, hindered with that same viscerality, not inertly debauched or wicked, just responding to human provocation. Even at the opening of the scene the physical posture and position assumed by the boys is animal: Hubert sits ape-like on the slide, clapping his hands together at the outbreak of a crude joke as Said talks about a girl he ‘screwed like an animal’. As the camera zooms out and the news crew drive hastily away Hubert shouts ‘Does this look like Thiory?’, a drive-in safari park, and it is apparent to the audience that youth have become a sub-culture, to be gaped at by the rest of society, blamed for its failings and to live in a permanent state of pejoration. The boys then walk away from the camera and the empty park ready to rejoin a society they don’t belong to.

Sophie Campaigne