Sound Corporeality and Multidirectional Acousmatic Music in Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine

This article explores the sound and music of Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (Hate, 1995), focusing especially on an aural and narrative turning point: DJ Cut Killer's cameo. A materiality of sound emerges in this moment, followed by acousmatic music working both traditionally (nondiegetic sound followed by revealing the diegetic visual source) and in reverse (revealing the diegetic visual source followed by sound that eventually escapes that source). Such compositions suggest that film music might always be acousmatic in some sense. This materiality of sound and the acousmatic quality of music aptly reflect the state of the Parisian racialized body in the mid-1990s banlieue.