I've recently been adding to the content on film on www.alevelfrench.com and have revisited La Haine with a vengeance. I've always had mixed feelings about the film but have grown to admire the production of it and the performances of the principal actors. I wrote a guide to it with language exercises including a summary, contextualised grammar exercises and an essay plan three years or so ago. (You can order from the site http://www.alevelfrench.com/home/mod/book/view.php?id=5) I decided however to produce a more detailed set of resources which would hopefully help teachers tackle the content of the film with more confidence.
Version of the film: The French language collectors' edition of the film with Kassovitz's walk through and the making of et is now available for around 12 euros + PP This provides lots of extra listening practice to back up language work around the film.
The script:- I sent off for a couple of versions of the script, one from the 90's with photos of the making of and a German edition of the scenario. Both these were the same and actually don't correspond very closely at all to what appears in the dialogue of the film. One of the first lessons then is to compare these two versions linguistically. I spent about a week transcribing the film on and off from the French version with the help of subtitles in French for the sourds et malentendants. What gets missed in subtitling is both detail and the sheer repetition; if Saïd says something once he says it three times; hardly a sentence doesn't finish with là; words which are misheard are often familiar words pronounced in verlan-therefore inverted as in oinj -joint. I've tried to capture the full conversation with its repetitions which gives a true reflection of how annoying Saïd and Vinz can be.
Getting down to detail: Analysing the film and saying why a scene is filmed using a particular combination of shots with particular sound and effects is pretty straight forward if you introduce students to the language of cinema using a site such as Hors Cadre http://www.horscadre.eu/enpratique/limage-et-ses-codes/ or Centre Images http://www.centreimages.fr/vocabulaire/index.html
The detail around the language used is however dependent on having a good accurate transcription of the film. There is more subtlety around Saïd than you would think; close examination of what he says reveals a boy who is frightened of what his parents will do to him if he gets into real trouble and who is logical about his physical limitations: "Je cours pas plus vite que les balles" Having been hopeless at learning quotations myself (too lazy?), I've found that setting quotations up in Quizlet gives a good platform for learning which can be either printed off, practise on a laptop or PC or through a free download app on a mobile phone or tablet.
Essays: My contention is that you can't write an essay if you can't write a paragraph and you can't write a paragraph if you can't write a sentence. Hence I have produced tools for sentence, paragraph and full essay planning. The sentence tool takes a phrase and plays with it increasing the complexity until your complex sentence is at least half a paragraph. The essay tool takes one piece of evidence and shows it incorporated using similar words in paragraphs which are responding to three different essay titles. Finally the content free essay planning tool is designed to print off in A3 (preferably) to get students planning their work in a non-sequential manner (spider diagramming, brainstorming-whatever you want to call it).
Sample essay plans and essays produced from them are provided for each examination board along with a guide to writing the essay to ensure students know where the marks go. This should be used in conjunction with examiners' reports.
Director background: I have produced a powerpoint for each producer tracing their childhood and early career linking through to youtube or dailymotion versions of their work. This is extremely informative for Kassovitz whose preceding works tee him up amazingly well for La haine. His spiky character comes across well in the interview made around the time of release of the film. It is interesting to contrast this with his more recent reaction to the reception of L'ordre et la morale.
Another film by the same director: Métisse with its cast of characters overlapping closely with La haine seemed a really interesting film to study alongside. The feeling of deja vu with certain images and scenes demonstrates the way a director gets certain ideas into his/her head that form part of their psyche almost. The police harassment that forms the back bone of La haine is already present in a milder way in the earlier film. The Jewishness which represents a third of the cultural influence of La haine is a dominant feature of Métisse.
The summary of the film I provide is several pages long and the verbs are gapped with the infinitive form to provide the necessary practice of verb forms.
Useful weblinks: New materials appear occasionally and when I hear of them I add them to the course to provide extra depth to the course offering.
I am going to be adding materials around analysing scenes and themes over the course of the next few weeks. This set of materials is £15. If you're interested, let me know and I'll invoice you by paypal or with a school invoice. The photocopy master, I wrote and published by linguascope, is also available for £15 from the URL above.
