The Sound of the Underground: La Haine x Asian Dub Foundation at The Southbank Centre

The Royal Festival Hall is enclosed within its own urban comforts, a sprawling curvature of architectural feat, sitting comfortably riverside. Yet its imposing mass provides the perfect setting for La Haine, where viewers are deliberately made uncomfortable—whether in our own biases, moral ambiguities, or the intensity of the film’s pace. The viewer is made afraid to confront these, but unable to turn away. The quiet moments of La Haine, where it is pensive and still (although there are few), are also encapsulated in the sublimity and overwhelm of the sheer number of people present. Perhaps these are even reflected through the comfortable distance from which the viewer watches, whether physically in the grandeur of the building or in the time between the film’s creation and its current showing. The viewer is consumed by sound—whether in the characters’ voices or the live soundtrack—voices and music become one, creating a rapid sense of urgency in the film’s message.

The timeliness of La Haine cannot be understated. Thirty years after its release, its message, themes, and plot feel all too familiar and painstakingly current. The film follows three young men across a simmering day in the Paris suburbs as they navigate the aftermath of a violent riot sparked by systemic oppression and police brutality. The trio’s conversations oscillate between humour and rage; it’s a film that relies on sound and the need to truly hear the voices of outsiders. The imagery shifts from the brutal, to the surreal, to the downright carnivalesque—men beaten and killed, cows roaming the streets of the suburbs, and elderly men delivering monologues from a toilet cubicle. But rather than the world being turned upside down, the world and the intensity of its hatred is mirrored to the viewer. The Paris of La Haine is fragile and hidden, unlike its delicate, ignorant counterpart in earlier French films, and the characters are forced to reckon with things they never could control to begin with.

La Haine, dir. Matthieu Kassovitz, 1995

It makes sense that a film which is all-consuming in sight and text should also be all-consuming in sound. The soundscape of Asian Dub Foundation sucks the viewer into the intensity of the film, placing them in the throngs of revolt. The film literally becomes alive and breathing through the constant electricity on stage. La Haine as a film repeatedly shows images which emphasise the sensuality of machinery; shots of escalators and train cars remind the viewer of modern technological progress. The black-and-white cinematography accentuates the clean lines of machinery against a messy urban landscape. It is no wonder that sound and image become inseparable through the instruments used by Asian Dub Foundation—new sound technologies emphasise this machinery while creating the literal stage on which La Haine plays out. Comparisons to early cinema are not lost; films used to be watched with live accompaniment. Of course, in this context, the sound replaced the voices, whereas this time it complements them. It reflects how cultural pasts can be repurposed to invite new ways of seeing—or, in this case, hearing: voices become vibrant but are occasionally drowned out by an inescapable sound that is out of our control.

La Haine, dir. Matthieu Kassovitz, 1995

Viewing La Haine at thirty in a way akin to how silent cinema was often consumed sends a clear message: sometimes we have to cross through the past again to make a better present. Progress depends on not only acknowledging the mistakes of the past, but unfortunately repeating them. Change is inevitable, but sometimes we can’t escape our own ways and the heartbreak that comes with them. La Haine’s core message is that “it’s not the fall that kills us but the landing.” This time, however, the soundtrack ends on a note of hope. Playing beyond the credits, Asian Dub Foundation leaves us with this rumination, allowing a moment for the viewer to determine how they will land.