While the resurgence of a “cinema des producteurs“1 and the development of the highly popular “film d’action” genre (Higbee 298) dominated the landscape of French mainstream cinema in the 1990s, the decade also witnessed the re-emergence of a politically committed, or what Powrie terms “New Realist” French cinema. New Realism, Powrie states, “refers less to a defined movement in French cinema […] sharing a political agenda, and more to a diverse group of film-makers who effected a re-engagement with sociopolitical subject matter” (16). Film makers such as Karim Dridi and Mathieu Kassovitz, whose films of the early to mid-nineties, Bye Bye (Dridi 1995), La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995), and Métisse (Kassovitz 1993) explore issues of xenophobia, unemployment, the ever-widening ‘fracture sociale‘ dividing the haves and the have-nots in French society and the important subculture emerging among those most negatively affected by these social iniquities, the youth of the cités or banlieues.2
Following Hebdige, I will argue that the banlieue subculture which Dridi and Kassovitz examine in their films, constitutes a form of “semiotic guerilla warfare” (Eco 105) waged by the disenfranchised youth of the suburban French ghettos against the “the ruling ideology” (133) of normative French culture.