Matthew McConway

The intricate interplay between sound and image in the opening scenes of  La Haineis fascinating, isn’t it? Kassovitz’s deliberate use of sound not only sets the tone but also constructs layers of meaning that resonate throughout the film. The juxtaposition of silence with Hubert’s acousmatic voiceover creates a stark contrast that immediately grabs the audience’s attention. This technique not only draws viewers into the narrative but also highlights the thematic significance of sound in the film.

The choice of Bob Marley’s “Burnin’ and Lootin'” adds another dimension to the scene. While the song complements the visual imagery by addressing themes of police brutality and social unrest, its reggae rhythm creates an interesting juxtaposition with the on-screen violence. This tension between the music and the imagery enhances the complexity of the scene, inviting viewers to reflect on the underlying social and political issues depicted in the film.

Furthermore, the use of diegetic and nondiegetic sound sources, such as the ticking clock and the distant sound of the helicopter, adds depth to the auditory experience. By immersing viewers in the soundscape of the banlieue, Kassovitz creates a sense of realism that enhances the film’s impact.

The closing sequence, with Hubert’s voiceover and the ticking clock resembling a ticking bomb, is particularly powerful. The absence of visual imagery allows the audience to focus solely on the auditory elements, intensifying the emotional resonance of Hubert’s words. This convergence of sound and silence underscores the film’s central themes of violence, alienation, and the search for identity.

Theoretical discussions around the role of music in cinema often revolve around its integration into the film’s narrative world. While historically, music was considered an add-on to the visual, recent perspectives challenge this view. Claudia Gorbman highlights that music in film always carries meaning, much like poetry. It can transcend its narrative context, blurring boundaries between diegetic and nondiegetic realms.

This blurring of boundaries generates narrative tensions, creating what Robynn Stilwell calls a “fantastical gap” between diegetic and nondiegetic music. These moments of overlap or confusion are deliberate narrative tools, aimed at engaging the audience emotionally and symbolically.

Jeff Smith adds to this discourse by focusing on the relationship between diegetic music and narrative space. He introduces the concept of metadiegetic music, which straddles the boundary between diegetic and nondiegetic, enhancing the film’s communicativeness.

Michel Chion’s concept of the acousmêtre, particularly the voice, further complicates this discussion. The acousmêtre possesses magical qualities and can exist both inside and outside the film’s image, blurring distinctions between diegetic and nondiegetic sound.

The corporeality of sound, emphasized by theorists like Gilles Deleuze and Rick Altman, underscores the physical nature of sound production. Sound disrupts surrounding matter, suggesting its materiality. This materiality extends to the aural body of film, which interacts with diegetic and extradiegetic spaces.

In the context of “La Haine,” the DJ Cut Killer scene exemplifies these theoretical concepts. The DJ’s visible and aural presence extends into both diegetic and extradiegetic realms, creating a palpable impact on the audience. The physicality of sound, depicted through the DJ’s hands manipulating turntables, underscores the corporeal nature of music production. This scene exemplifies the dynamic interplay between music, narrative space, and audience engagement in cinema.

I have booked foley room today to collect some sounds. I have a list of sounds that I think I will need. I am going in with the ethos found in the pinewood studio, that gathering more than necessary to provide myself with more ‘ammunition’ in the mix, is the way to go.

Because I am redoing the sound to the opening scenes of La Haine, the majority of the sounds I will need to gather today are impacts, footsteps, fabric rustles and misc. shouting and screaming etc.

I chose to use a Zoom H5 to record sounds today, as it is an easy way to get great quality, stereo recordings. I know I could use better mics/preamps, but I will be distorting and filtering the sounds heavily in the mix, to fit the archival footage it will be on top of.

I had great fun recording! It was a fantastic way to allow my imagine to be flexible and try to create the necessary sounds out of the objects at hand.

I got different raw impact sounds by dropping different objects of different materials onto carpet and stone. These included; a mop bucket (sometimes filled with stone, glass and other metal objects), wooden planks, bricks, water bottles and any other object I could find.

To recreate the sound of fire, I recorded the rustling of some tape, some plastic bags, and some bubble wrap. I felt the bubble wrap had a nice low end to it that can definitively add to the realism of a fire sound. I think these could all be layered quite well in the mix.

Footsteps were quite simple to record, as I had 2 different pairs of shoes with me. I used the stone flooring in the foley room and stepped, jumped and shuffled around for a few minutes to get loads of variations. I will then chop and sync these later.

Finally today, I recorded a plethora of different screams and shouts. I put the H5 to one side of the room, and shouted and screamed in a French sounding accent using different pitches and tones of voice, for around 7 minutes. I am not too concerned about discernability of these noises as they will be heavily affected in the mix.

I still have quite a bit of field recording to do, and a few more foley sounds, but these can be done over this week!

-Sound of fire

-Various different street sounds (loud & quiet)

-Sirens

-Various different types of footsteeps

-Fabric Rustles

-Impacts

-Explosions

-Glass Smashing

-Impact for car rolling over

-Dog Bark

-Marker squeak

-Clock Tick

-Breath In

-Swishing sounds for camera movements

-Synthesised zoom down

-Distorted unintelligible shouts and screams

In La Haine, director Mathieu Kassovitz transitions from non-diegetic to diegetic sound to deepen audience immersion. The film starts with non-diegetic music, Bob Marley’s “Burnin’ and Lootin’,” playing over riot scenes. This music sets a contrasting tone to the violent imagery.

After the opening credits, the same song transitions to diegetic as it plays faintly in the background when Saïd appears. This change makes the music part of the characters’ environment, drawing viewers into the story.

Kassovitz’s use of this technique connects the initial detached view of the riots with the personal story of the teenagers, maintaining thematic continuity. It reminds viewers of the prior violence and foreshadows the characters’ potential involvement in similar events, enhancing engagement and narrative depth.

Notes relating to music

-“The music on La Haine is basically the music that you can hear within the scenes… within ‘real life’

-“A good movie shouldn’t have music”

“If you are a good enough director, you should make people cry without the use of music.”

-“[Kassovitz wanted to] use a lot of surround sounds and make it as wide as we can by having sounds we don’t see and we don’t know where they come from.”

-“Everything was written, there was no improv. We improved everything by living the movie way before we started shooting.”

-“we cant be listened to so we are going to burn and loot”

“La Haine is both stylised and naturalistic, placing the audience deep within its banlieue setting, so that it becomes an observer of what the then-president Jacques Chirac had described disparagingly a couple of years earlier in his career as “le bruit et l’odeur” (the noise and the stench) of such working-class areas. It’s this layer of banlieue noise – piercing police sirens, smashing glass, the shouts of street fights echoing between concrete high-rises – that blends so effectively with the film’s soundtrack. The combination of the two clearly evokes the simmering brutality that in France was ready to boil over by the mid-1990s.”

“Kassovitz recruited the hardcore rap collective Assassin – a group that emerged from the banlieues in the mid-1980s – to oversee the film’s soundtrack.”

“This presented a real opportunity to put French rap at the forefront; to spit out a uniquely French take on the passion and anger of gangster rap.”

La Haine’s soundtrack is one rooted in rebellion and struggle.

“These French artists, often of African and North African ancestry, rewrote bleu-blanc-rouge – the blue-white-red of the French flag – as black-blanc-beur, ‘black-white-Arab’, and espoused a rap rooted in diaspora and protest. And so, when a fresh wave of riots exploded on the capital’s outskirts again a decade later in 2005, the then-minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, found a scapegoat: not just the citizens themselves, but the French rappers who radicalised them. This resulted in rappers facing legal action.”

“La Haine’s opening scene depicts real footage of demonstrations and riots in the banlieues of Paris over the previous decade, set to Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Burnin’ and Lootin’. Kassovitz said that he wanted city sounds to become a sort of music of their own, “a growl, a layer of sound but a natural sound”.”

“Reggae has historically been a vehicle for sociopolitical commentary, so the tune was a natural choice to introduce Kassovitz’s blistering treatise on police-on-banlieue brutality.”

Auteur – A film director who influences their films so much that they rank as their authors.

-treat music as “a key thematic element and a marker of authorial style”

-“Auteur melomania is a specific historical phenomenon”

-Melomania is an inordinate liking for music or melody.

-‘…the ‘auteur director’ has placed a premium on asserting control of the texture, rhythm and tonality of his or her work, and of the social identifications, made available through music choices.”

-“advent of digital recording… as well as digital video editing have made it possible for directors to exert much greater control over the selection and placement of music in their films.”

-“Liberated the music soundtrack”

-“music is a platform for the idiosyncratic expression of taste and thus it conveys not only meaning in terms of plot and theme, but meaning as authorial signature itself.”

-In ‘Jackie Brown’ Max Cherry “tenderly acquires” the Delfonic’s song ‘Didn’t I (Blow your mind this time)’ after hearing Jackie play it. From then on “their” song “takes on resonance as a repeated theme, a special kind of diagetic resonance involving characters knowledge or lack of knowledge, and characters openness (or not) to ‘hearing’ one another”

-“the music’s arbitrary segmentation not only reflects and aesthetic negation but it also yields another kind of expressive depth.”

-“the auteur can write in cinema, using sound as well as camera.”

“In conventional cinema, music’s syntax is surely secondary to narrative syntax. The arc and timing of music is normally subordinated to the demands of the scene, but a set of long established rules “softens” the way the narrative flow determines the length of music cues, making music fit the form of the scene…” “For Godard, music is a montage element, subject to radical disruption and placed in dialectical relationships with the image and the other soundtrack elements.”

-“…music carries cultural meaning…”

I decided to read this article after reading about Mathieu Kassovitz as an ‘Auteur’, to develop an understanding of how auteur’s use music within their films. These ways of thinking around music in cinema as more than just a soundtrack is fascinating. The short case studies on each director in this essay made this information accessible in a way that simply defining concepts wouldn’t. In my next reading I would like to find out how Kassovitz wished to use music in La Haine himself, and find out other academics views on it.

“La Haine” is a 1995 French film directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. Set in the Parisian suburbs, it follows three friends—Vinz, Hubert, and Saïd—over the course of 24 hours after a riot. The film delves into themes of police brutality, racism, and social inequality. With its gritty realism and social commentary, “La Haine” has become a cult classic. “La Haine” has an interesting approach to sound an music, which reflects it’s themes and other stylistic choices. I wish to approach the sound in a similar way to Kassovitz, as I feel it would be a interesting exercise to dive into the world of sound in La haine.

Gaze was a fascinating short film, with some very interesting sonic points to extract.

-The film, as a whole takes, on a very quiet and passive soundscape (distant atmospheric sounds, the sounds of the bus.) This gives it a very intimate feeling, which is emphasised by the lack of soundtrack. The mundanity of sonics, implies the mundanity of a daily commute.

-After a period of quietness, loud vocal chaos ensues when the protagonist decides to confront the pickpocket. This contrast in loudness really intensifies the drama of the scene. The fall back to near silence leaves the viewer feeling even more unsettled, analysing what has just happened.

-The sound of the motorcycle is fascinating. When the viewer sees the pickpocket is on the motorcycle following the bus, danger then becomes connected to that sound. The fading in and out of this sound further emphasises the unease, making it impossible for the protagonist, and therefore the view to feel settled and safe.

-The sound of the motorcycle takes on so much power that even after the protagonist has made it back home to safety, the sound of the motorcycle still makes her and the viewer uneasy.

-What I took away from this short film is the importance of contrast. Contrast between quiet, passive sounds, to loud and much more active sounds.

-I also recognise the importance of a connection between and sound and what is implied by said sound. The sound of the motorcycle almost becomes a character in the film, a character that will no doubt bring pain. I feel this evokes a sense of danger and anxiety more than dialogue could.