There is a manner in which the whole project might be read as a particularly fuzzy French attempt at Guliani's "broken-window" policy, combined with aforementioned basketball league. Give the rambunctious young'uns someplace else to break the windows and commit the vandalism of "tagging" (a vaguely protected piece of urban cultural production since Jack Lang in the 1980s) - and wouldn't it be an interesting twist if this box that apparently no one wants/uses became a contested territory between rival groups. But it also seems to reduce the problem of juvenile delinquency to an issue of place; and “place” has been an issue among the French for sometime, committed as they are to the construction of what Pierre Nora has called “sites of memory.” Though there is also the wary speculation of Michel Foucault who, in his Discipline and Punish, offered the “Panopticon.” A “site” which should not be “understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form . . . polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons.”
The question now becomes what the “distribution of individuals in relation to one another,” means when the space allotted is not really a space at all but the recreation of an entry-way – when the passage from the external world to the ostensibly internal becomes an end in itself? Mies van der Rohe once declared that the role of the architect and modern architecture was to “express the will of the epoch . . . For the meaning and justification of each epoch, even the new one, lie only in providing the conditions under which the spirit can exist.” What “will” is being expressed and whose “spirit can exist” in an architectural equivalent of purgatory? Considering all this, it is only the most fortuitous expression of ironic convenience that the “faux hall” is made of a shipping container – somehow it doesn’t seem as if its economic role in the transport of things away and out of sight has changed all that much, it has only become a social one.
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Kassovitz' "La Haine" is more than just a good movie. At the time, it was criticized by conservatives in France for its negative portrait of the police. Politicians of all stripes watched the movie hoping to learn a bit more about the country's diversity and the guetto's underdevelopment. At least this is what I read before watching it. When I finally did, I found myself struggling to detect the supposed message of social exclusion, French racism, or police brutality.
Most cops depicted in the movie appear as, if anything, too patient, too courteous, too appeasing. Even in the scene where two of them are physically abusing Said and Hubert in an improvised training of "enhanced" interrogation techniques, the director includes the redemptive figure of a disapproving new recruit. Nearly every instance of friction or trouble is initiated by Vinz, the Jewish character, and the same goes for most racist slurs. White France is depicted rather favorably, most especially from the beginning of the scene at the art exhibit to the attempted carjacking and subsequent escape with the help of a friendly drunkard. In general, the damage to the guetto is portrayed as self-inflicted: Hubert's gym, for example, has been burnt down by one of his closest friends and other rioters.
It surprises me that my interpretation of the movie's message was so different than the expected one. I've watched many movies about police brutality, social exclusion, and racism, and "La Haine" didn't fall in its proclaimed category.
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