La Haine, twenty years after the concrete

You rewatch La Haine and nothing has changed.

No — it’s worse. Everything has changed, but in the wrong direction. Kassovitz’s film, in 1995, had the brutality of an observation. Thirty years later, the observation has become a fulfilled prophecy, and the prophecy has become daily scenery.

The fall continues

“So far so good.” The phrase has become a meme, a t-shirt quote, a podcast title. It has been co-opted, digested, excreted by the cultural machine. But the fall itself continues. The man is still falling. The ground still hasn’t arrived — or perhaps we’ve simply grown accustomed to falling.

What the film couldn’t predict

Kassovitz couldn’t have predicted that the banlieue would become a cinematic genre. That anger would be aestheticized, formatted, awarded at Cannes. That directors would film poverty in Dolby Atmos and critics would speak of a “necessary gaze.”

La Haine is not a “necessary gaze.” It’s a scream. And a scream is not something you critique. You hear it or you run from it.

Today

Today, the housing projects have surveillance cameras but no cinema cameras. The images of the banlieue are images of control, not creation. Kassovitz’s black and white was an aesthetic choice. The black and white of surveillance cameras is an economic one.

The difference between the two is all of cinema.

The point isn’t to rewatch La Haine. The point is to understand why we still need to.