Abstract
Cyril Collard's TV-film Taggers (1990), an episode of the series Le Lyonnais, has been largely overlooked in scholarship and public reception. This article takes an intersectional perspective, steering away from the dominant focus on white, middle-class, gay male experiences in studies of AIDS-related cultural production. It examines Taggers as a work that depicts overlapping stigmas of HIV/AIDS, racialisation, drug use, and urban marginality in early 1990s France. It proposes the concept of ‘writer culture’ – encompassing tagging, graffiti, and street art. The analysis shows how Taggers exposes the conflation of criminality, drug use, and racialised identities, and how the tag and signature function as a signum resisting stigmatisation. By situating Collard's work beyond the reductive label of ‘AIDS-writer’, this study highlights his attention to systemic oppression, spatial and social segregation, and the entanglement of race, class, and urban marginality in cultural productions of the period.
‘S’il y avait un art de la signature…’ Jacques Derrida 1
Introduction
Author, musician and filmmaker Cyril Collard notes about his novel and film Les Nuits fauves (1989, 1992): ‘Rien n’est jamais noir ou blanc mais noir et blanc’. Here, as in his other works, he strives to show ‘les caractères des gens qui [sont] peut-être contradictoires, […] mais qui [sont] pour [lui] le reflet de la vie’ (Collard in Durham, 2002: 520; Collard in Cazenave and Headline, 1993). Collard's complex engagement with the socio-cultural context in which he lived has often been disregarded; he has been considered an author of a single work (see Durham, 2002: 512), albeit reproduced twice – Les Nuits fauves exists both as a novel and as a film. The film in particular became extremely popular, receiving three César Awards at the ceremony that took place three days after Collard's death from complications due to HIV/AIDS (see Gabara, 2005: 65–66). It was labelled a ‘film phare’ in which a generation could recognise itself. 2 Despite Collard's fame, scholars undervalue or ignore the work he produced between his novel and his film, such as the 1990 Taggers, an episode of the series Le Lyonnais. Taggers depicts the Magical Killers, 3 a group of street artists and rappers. 4 Following the premise of Le Lyonnais, the episode narrates a police investigation into a murder in the Minguettes banlieue of Lyon, that of a Direction Départementale des Affaires Sanitaires et Sociales (DDASS) employee who had become affiliated with the Magical Killers. The investigation is led by officer Sélim Rey (Kader Boukhanef), the son of an Algerian mother and a French father, who infiltrates the Magical Killers under the guise of a journalist, guided by one of their members, Paco (Francisco Giménez). Collard depicts a ‘grey area’ in the character of Velvet, who functions as both murderer and martyr. This role marks Guillaume Dépardieu's first major performance, a fact scarcely acknowledged in criticism. Taggers highlights complexities at the heart of Collard's oeuvre and reveals his sustained interest in moral ambiguity, racism, xenophobia, and stigmatisation. In Taggers, HIV/AIDS, racialisation, drug use and urban marginality are experienced together by the same characters and within the same urban spaces. I read Taggers as an intersectional work showing that the discrimination against people with AIDS (hereafter PWAs) is not an isolated process but embedded in broader processes of racialisation, segregation and stigmatisation.
Sélim's investigation gradually uncovers the group's dynamics, including its leader, Zina, who is revealed to be pregnant with Velvet's child. Booker, a Magical Killer arrested for reselling drugs, eventually reveals his supplier, N’Domba, who admits to dealing drugs under pressure from higher-level dealers but denies committing the murder. Sélim's investigation leads him to discover that Velvet, a young member of the Magical Killers, is the killer; he murdered the DDASS employee after discovering Zina's pregnancy and her decision to seek an abortion. The climax unfolds on a bridge, where Velvet, covered in black paint, attempts suicide with a shotgun and is shot dead by the police. This violent event forces Sélim to confront systemic police racism and his own prejudices, leading him to temporarily leave the force and visit Algeria.
Collard's work falls under the umbrella of ‘AIDS-culture’, a term used by Richard Canning to designate artistic and testimonial works about AIDS (2010: 132, 138). Taggers is an early contribution to this field as it was released before what Canning calls the ‘five-year period of intense cultural activity, between around 1992 and 1997’ (Canning, 2010: 135).
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Canning has noted: In the United States and the United Kingdom, as in other English-speaking countries and in France, the statistical majority of literature about AIDS has been written by and about Caucasian gay men, invariably middle class. Early on, in particular, women sufferers and drug users died much more quickly of HIV/AIDS illnesses; non-white voices took time to emerge, presumably reflecting a longstanding distance from commercial outlets. (2010: 137)
With this article, I ask why research on AIDS-related cultural productions may have failed to acknowledge the complexity of certain works, including the ways in which they give testimony to processes of racialisation and to the stigmatisation of drug use. His biographers, Jean-Philippe Guerand and Martine Moriconi, label Collard ‘le porte-parole’ of the AIDS crisis (1999: 79), despite his insistence on Nuits fauves not being about AIDS (see Feinstein, 1994: 51). He has been confined to the category of an ‘AIDS writer,’ and the intersectionality of his work has been simultaneously obscured by the very act that imposed this reductive label. With my analysis of Taggers, I argue that stories about racialised, lower-class communities in the banlieues are indeed present within ‘AIDS culture’. Taggers, which constitutes Collard's ‘débuts dans le domaine du long métrage’, has remained largely understudied in academic work and cultural criticism; according to Guerand and Moriconi, it is ‘destiné à être regardé au premier degré comme un bon divertissement’ (1999: 81). The biographers’understanding of this TV film as a piece of 'entertainment' signals the exclusivity and limitations of their conception of ‘AIDS culture’, even though they did not use the term explicitly. This may prompt us to rethink what we mean by ‘AIDS-writer’, ‘AIDS-literature’ or indeed ‘AIDS-culture’. The public acclaim of Les Nuits fauves, led, as Cristina Johnston has shown, to the wide discussion of ‘the issues it tackled – sexuality […] questions of AIDS and HIV’ (2010: 24). If we follow Collard's prompt and move beyond an AIDS-centred reading of Taggers, it emerges as a broader, intersectional reflection on stigmatisation. My analysis of Taggers invites a renewed consideration of Collard's wider oeuvre and may encourage further study, including of Les Nuits fauves. 6
Stigma and writer culture
HIV/AIDS is an illness laden with stigma, as Susan Sontag has noted (e.g. 1991: 124). Stigma has material consequences; J. Takács et al. have noted that ‘stigmatization, through its serious disempowering effects on the stigmatized, can limit access to prevention and care services. Fear of discrimination can discourage people from being tested and, for those with positive HIV test results, may contribute to the nondisclosure of HIV status to others including friends and sexual partners’ (2013: 25–26). Imogen Tyler's study of ‘stigma’ links ‘the concept […] to economic and materialist histories of bodily marking’ (2020: 15): I follow Tyler's call to think of the material mark left by a branding instrument. While tracing the etymology and definition of ‘stigma’, she notes that ‘this use of “stigmata” to describe the marks left by torture on the skin of runaway slaves furnishes stigma with a vicious and bloody meaning, binding the etymology of stigma to the 400-year history of chattel slavery’ (2020: 9): she connects the term with the branding of slaves as a form of punishment or as a sign of ownership over them (2020: 10). While I bear Tyler's reflections in mind, in my analysis, ‘stigma’ does not apply uniquely to racialised bodies.
Collard's oeuvre features a range of visibly marked bodies: from the two iterations of Les Nuits fauves to Alger la blanche (1986) and his unpublished manuscript Cicatrices, tattoos and scars of various kinds abound. In Taggers, one central topic is the marking of the urban skin with tags, graffiti, or writing more broadly, offering a way to think about the notion of ‘stigma’. This article proposes the expression ‘writer culture’, modelled on ‘skateboard culture’ and ‘sneaker culture’, in contrast to the tag-exclusive ‘graffiti’ to refer to cultural formations associated with street art, tags and graffiti. Indeed, the documentary Style Wars notes about the artists in question that ‘They call themselves writers, because that's what they do, they write their names’ (Silver and Chalfant, 1983).
Taggers itself dwells extensively on a variety of strands of writer culture and the diversity of artistic products that ensue from it, all originating in this initial practice of marking the urban surface. Paco differentiates tag, ‘un genre de signature’, from graffiti (also known as pieces): ‘c’est autre chose, c’est des grandes peintures murales, des œuvres d’art’, they are large mural-style works. Studies of graffiti art, wall art, or, more broadly, writer culture, will be central to my study of Collard's film. Notable writers appear in the film, including JoeyStarr (artist of the band NTM) and Marco Prince (artist of the group FFF). I will tease out the connection of Taggers to its contemporary music and art world in my conclusion.
Writer culture has itself been the subject of stigma. Stigmatised spaces, such as subway cars were historically a medium for the urban spreading of writing. As Joe Austin analyses, eventually writing was exiled from the subway by the authorities and migrated ‘toward “invisible” spaces’ (2001: 239). Austin notes that these spaces are ‘important to youth cultures as sites for activities that are not otherwise allowed’ (2001: 239). These spaces – tunnels, the underside of bridges and generally dark corners of the city – are the settings in which Collard stages his ‘nuits fauves’ which include non-cisheteronormative and generally taboo sexual activities. They are the primary settings of Taggers: tags germinate in these spaces and spread through the city. Further, they are the stage of the reselling of drugs in Taggers (Collard, 1990: 0:02:05). Through this topographical movement and through associations with the settings of illegal activities: tags, drugs and illness (HIV/AIDS) become performatively entangled. Writing itself comes to be understood as ‘destructive and contagious’ (Hannerz and Kimvall, 2020: 86), a viral entity that ‘disfigure[s] the living environment’ (Public Letter 1997, in Hannerz and Kimvall, 2020: 86); in this way, writer culture itself becomes subject to stigma. In Taggers, the writers’ practices of marking the city, their racially marked bodies, and their activities – regardless of legality – are conflated and stigmatized, particularly by the authorities. Drug use and writing are identified by the police as markers of further crime, namely the murder of the DDASS employee in Taggers. As Sélim investigates the spreading of drugs to identify the murderer, he insists, ‘Tout est lié.’ 7
Amalgamated stigma: drug use and race
In Taggers, writer culture appears alongside racialised policing, urban exclusion and the criminalisation of drug use, with the result that anyone associated with writing is treated as suspect rather than judged on individual actions. Taggers draws attention to, and critically interrogates, the juxtaposition of criminality, drug-use and writer culture, and as such highlights the structure of stigma that identifies one source of non-normative behaviour with another. Donna Haraway has notably elaborated upon a process of ‘untangling a ball of yarn’ that represents stigma (Haraway, 1987, in Tyler, 2020: 20): Imogen Tyler has taken up this image in her own study of stigma as importantly always already entangled with processes of racialisation from the outset. Taggers, I propose, works to ‘untangle’ the ‘knots’ that tie drugs and writing together, to use the wording of Haraway.
Let me focus first on drug use. ‘Regardé au premier degré’ (Guerand and Moriconi, 1999: 81), as Collard's biographers have done, Taggers shows a denunciation of drugs by the members of the Magical Killers. Their leader, Zina, reminds the Taggers about the ‘principes du mouvement’: ‘Pas de drogue, pas d’alcool, pas de violence, pas de racisme.’ Regarding the murderer Velvet's heroin consumption, Paco voices criticism: ‘il y va fort’, linking heroin to murder. Further, the figure of the inert ‘Johnny boy’ in the opening scenes, his arm bearing a syringe mark, references those killed by drugs. This scene also evokes HIV infection via intravenous drug use, highlighting Collard's attention to a traditionally underrepresented group of PWAs. Indeed, through the association of HIV/AIDS with male homosexuality – exemplified by the name ‘Gay-Related Immune Deficiency’ (see Canning, 2010: 133) – ‘women, children, intravenous drug users, those receiving contaminated blood products […] may have exhibited HIV- and AIDS-related symptoms without their being identified’ (Canning, 2010: 133).
Singing about one such underrepresented PWA Group-IV drug users – Francesco and Paco, two young boys who live with the Magical Killers, seemingly give voice to such anti-drug stances. They sing their first song in Spanish about the ‘maldición del diablo’ [devil's curse] that is heroin (Collard, 1990: 00:15:15), and Paco explains to the non-Spanish-speaker Sélim: ‘c’est une chanson contre la drogue’. The lyrics of Paco and Francesco's second song performed in Taggers are as follows: Gente de altas esferas, También están implicados, Para cubrir apariencias, Se van a los barrios bajos, Y se llevan detenidos A cuatro pobres diablos. (Collard, 1990: 00:58:50) [People from higher circles, Are also implicated, To cover up appearances, They go to the poor neighbourhoods, And there will be detained Four poor devils]. (Collard, 1990: 00:59:15)
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As we decipher these lyrics, it becomes clear that they denounce the exploitative system formed around drugs rather than drug use itself. Paco shows an acute awareness of capitalist exploitation through comments such as ‘Noël c’est une arnaque commerciale.’ These lyrics particularly denounce the system of what Tyler terms ‘the stigma machine’ that punishes racialised, marginalised bodies. Tyler contends that such stigmatisation is part of ‘wider capitalist structures of expropriation, domination, discipline and social control’ (2020: 17), from which the ‘gente de altas esferas’ profit (Collard, 1990: 00:58:50). Collard's film reveals the racism inherent to processes of stigmatisation, although understanding this necessitates the viewer's active engagement with all parts of the film, including their deciphering of the lyrics of the song. A more directly accessible denunciation of systemic racism is that of Ali, the first suspect in the murder. He notes: ‘quand les flics foutent un Arabe en tôle […] il prend dix ans au lieu de trois ans qu’on inflige d’habitude aux Français’. The role of the police in this system is further shown through Johnny Boy, mentioned above. While his syringe mark denounces drug use, his name means ‘sacrificed to the police’ and as such denotes police violence (‘Johnny boy’ in Urban Dictionary). Closer attention to Taggers reveals that the film denounces systemic racism and classism and highlights the harmful processes of amalgamation.
In the process of the murder investigation, Detective Morphée has a conversation with an employee of the DDASS organisation and some of the core messages of the film are verbalised by this employee, named Claudine Bertrand, when she states: ‘méfiez-vous d’amalgamer trop rapidement, meurtre, tag et drogue’ – this warning comes against an uncritical amalgamation into a stereotyped understanding of the (racialised) body as criminal. Claudine reflects on the tag: ‘Je voudrais vraiment que vous compreniez un truc. C’est un cri, c’est un cri de désespoir qu’ils lancent en écrivant leur propre nom sur tous les murs de la ville’ and she adds to her argument against uncritical amalgamation: ‘pensez plutôt que le tag, pour celui qui a tué, c’est la seule façon d’être dans ce monde, d’y vivre’. She refuses to provide names of members of the Magical Killers to Morphée, ‘certainement pas, je suis pas indicatrice de police’ – the DDASS is distanced from the police force, which is perhaps the primary object of criticism of Collard's film.
Processes of amalgamation of identity categories and legal or illegal activities have been denounced by AIDS critics. People and activities associated with non-normative sexuality, promiscuity, drug-use and racialised people come to emblematise the carriers of HIV. 9 Detangling identity categories and activities, as Taggers prompts us to do, is necessary in anti-racist and anti-queerphobic activism. Additionally, to return to HIV/AIDS, studies and testimonies show that ‘high rates of corruption, pervasive poverty, and marginalisation of drug users’ all contribute to high death rates among intravenous drug users (Strathdee et al., 2010: 272). The actions of the police in particular have been denounced by scientific research: one study states that ‘policing practices can directly affect the risk of HIV acquisition by affecting where, when, with whom, and the context within which drugs are injected’ (Strathdee et al., 2010: 272–273). David Caron has drawn attention to the blame falling onto individual victims instead of the systemic causes of the AIDS pandemic – including structural inequalities (Caron, 2001: 101). Taggers points to the same conclusion while putting emphasis on the processes of stigmatisation that are part and parcel of these systems.
In Taggers, the police repeat racist stereotypes. Sélim peeks into an interrogation in which the policemen are seen intimidating a person and threaten him with physical aggression: ‘tu sais mon collègue et moi on aime pas tellement les bougnoules’, one of them says as Sélim walks away. These same policemen later beat up Booker while interrogating him, they threaten him and throw him through a window – acts of aggression made more striking against the festive workplace setting (Collard, 1990: 01:16:17). While his injured arm is being stitched up, Booker puts another central message of the film into words. He concludes that systematic oppression exacerbates violence; he denounces the police force as ‘à la base de toute la haine […] les gosses avec les fusils à pompe, les mômes qui sont violés’ (Collard, 1990). Through the words of Booker, Taggers associates racism and further violence with the institution of the police.
After his arrest, Booker reveals the identity of his drug supplier to Sélim, who, with this, hopes to get a step closer to succeeding in his investigation. Booker describes him to Sélim: ‘il guérit les esprits malades […] grand marabout devant l’Éternel’: N’Domba, a Marabout, that is a Muslim religious leader, is also a drug-dealer, supplying the Magical Killers with cocaine. The police arrest N’Domba and accuse him of killing the DDASS employee, once again linking drug use and dealing to murder. Yet Sélim appears to recognise this mistaken lead and speaks in private to N’Domba, who reveals that he only pursued drug-dealership out of financial necessity and under the authority of his own supplier: ‘Marabout à Lyon ça paye mal, et déposer des publicités dans des boîtes aux lettres, c’est pas trop mon genre’ (Collard, 1990: 1:25:52). N’Domba's testimony supports the message carried by Paco and Francesco's song quoted above: he denounces an exploitative capitalist system – the viewer is reminded of this message as the song returns during the end credits of Taggers. N’Domba further opens Sélim's eyes to his own prejudice: ‘tu cherchais un sale assassin bien classique et rassurant, Sélim, ton meurtrier s’appelle Velvet, il a dix-huit ans, il avait juste le bras prolongé par un couteau à un mauvais moment’ (Collard, 1990: 1:27:10). The film thus undercuts police suspicion by exposing how prejudice, rather than evidence, structures the investigation.
Signature as resistance
Having examined how bodies and urban surfaces are marked through processes of stigmatisation in Taggers, I now turn to the question of signature and its potential as a form of resistance. Stigma, as Susan Sontag writes in relation to AIDS, ‘give[s] someone a new identity,’ turns one ‘into one of “them”’ – it marks its subject as Other (1991: 124). It predetermines their treatment by society and produces material consequences. Sontag's point might be compared to what Michel Servière calls, in relation to the signature, the ‘marquage au fer rouge du nom’, that defines the identity of its bearer. ‘Stigma’ and ‘signum’ are connected through their shared etymological meaning of a mark made by a pointed instrument (see ‘Sign’ in Oxford English Dictionary), allowing us to reflect on the relationship between visible bodily mark and claimed identity. 15 While, as Tyler notes, ‘When we use the word stigma today we don’t tend to use it to mean the literal acts of inscription that this definition suggests’, the signature is always a literally inscribed and visible mark. Conversely, the term ‘signature’ might be associated primarily with the simple action of marking one's name, yet ‘writer culture’ links the act of signing with the claiming of an identity. Yet in Le sujet de l'art, which includes a theorisation of the signature, Servière notes that the artist's signature can become a form of renaming, a fashioning of the name through the work of art signed: ‘le sujet peintre, se renomme en signant. Entre nom et renommée visée viennent s’interposer les sujets peints; l’œuvre’ (Servière, 1997: 207). A network of elements comes to play a role in the signature, including the artwork itself and its object. Servière emphasises that in this network, the signature produces agency. Taggers depicts and critically interrogates systemic stigmatisation. The tag, in particular, and more broadly the iterability of the signature, I propose, offer resistance to stigmatisation, a push of the ‘signum’ against stigma.
In relation to the tag, an artist in Style Wars notes a fragment of agency: the writer, through tagging, can ‘take [a] name and do something with it’ (Silver and Chalfant, 1983), that is, once again, providing its user with agency. Through its repetition and modulation, the signature appears as a cunning, becoming entity; Servière emphasises ‘les tours et retours retors du devenir d’un nom d’élection joué-travaillé en signature’ (Servière, 1997: 206). The phrase ‘tours et retours retors’ suggests that the adoption of a name is not a simple act of self-designation but a negotiated and reworked practice. The signature is less as a fixed marker of identity than as an ongoing process of construction. The characters of Taggers themselves substitute their birth names, notably Booker. Brought in by the police after being arrested for reselling drugs and suspected of complicity in murder, Booker is interrogated: Policeman: C’est quoi ton nom? Booker: Mon nom c’est Booker. Policeman: Non, c’est Adin Guédé, t’as une fiche de police déjà à ton nom, Adin Guédé. Tu nous prends pour des cons? (Collard, 1990: 1:14:12)
The name is tied to a subordination of its bearer, as Servière notes, mirroring the dynamics of stigma. The ‘fiche de police’, linked to the birth name, embodies a past that shapes the subject's future. A stigma mark on the life record, it justifies a physical subordination of Booker by the police as they seize and aggress him. Servière observes: ‘la signature s’en joue’ (Servière, 1997: 241). The elected name, challenging police authority, allows a shift away from the recorded name, which is linked to the prewritten future embodied in the police record. Dismissed by the policemen as ‘un nom de planque’, the elected name stands as a symbol of agency and a turning towards life, as Booker insists: ‘qu’est-ce que ça veut dire un nom de planque, c’est mon nom de rue, c’est un nom de tag, c’est un nom de vie’ (Collard, 1990, my emphasis). ‘Booker’ notably references the function of stigma as a mark made with a pointed instrument, through its relationship to writing (‘writing, written account, book’; Oxford English Dictionary).
Racial stigma is also linked to strategies of segregation; border security is tied to ‘ethnic security’ in discourses against migration (Tyler, 2020: 127), processes that writer culture resists in Taggers. Collard worked in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the term ‘mixité sociale’ became widespread in the context of institutionalising the ‘Politique de la Ville’ (Vadelorge, 2019: 138; Loi n°91-662 in Légifrance). The ‘loi d’Orientation sur la Ville’, of which this is a key expression (Loi n°91-662 in Légifrance), fights spatial segregation based on racial differences. However, it remains limited to a ‘juxtaposition des différences dans l’espace’, without the ‘possibilité d’une rencontre ou d’un entre-deux’, as Vadelorge shows (2019: 139). Taggers portrays these processes of segregation in Lyon. Spatial isolation is a central component of the banlieue stereotype. In a scene paradigmatic of this isolation, Booker and the Magical Killers are denied entry into a club: Booker: Mais ça va, laisse-nous rentrer dans ta boîte, on est pas venu pour foutre le bordel là […] regarde on est tous bien sapé, on vient danser chez toi. Bouncer: Tu laisses tomber, ici c’est un club privé. C’est un endroit pour les blancs alors tu prends tes Zoulous et vous vous cassez. Sur les quais il y a des boîtes pour les Beurs. (Collard, 1990: 00:37:07)
In another scene, the characters run through glass tunnel-like structures, marking the walls with tags (Collard, 1990: 00:04:13). This scene depicts the viral, fast-paced spreading of the tag on the urban skin, mirroring Collard's interest in speed as in his fast-driving imagery (Cazenave and Headline, 1993). Turning away from the mechanical, this spreading can be read as a reclamation of another definition of ‘stigma’ – that of the plant's reproductive particle, as tags germinate and disseminate across the urban body (see ‘Stigma’ in Oxford English Dictionary). Following Baudrillard, tags bring life to urban walls: ‘les rendent à la matière vive’ (1976: 127). Against stigma as a marker of death, the tag becomes a marker of existence: ‘Je suis, j’existe, je suis réel’ (Baudrillard, 1976: 127). 10 Its movement blurs segregationist boundaries; the urban body becomes ‘un corps sans fin ni commencement’ (Baudrillard, 1976: 126).
Later, the writers gather in a gallery space. Here, writer culture creates a site of encounter across racial, class-, age-, and gender-based differences, embodied by Célia's gallery. Representative of a bourgeois milieu, Célia (Laura Favali) stands apart from the Magical Killers, as some writers label her ‘une petite bourge […] du centre-ville’. While galleries conventionally police art, Célia's space paradoxically offers resistance to segregation and stigmatization. It exhibits writing and stages rap battles, where lyrics assert: ‘l’unité est un mot qui dépasse la couleur de la peau’ (Collard, 1990: 1:22:00). She assumes a maternal role, caring for Francesco and Paco, and tending to a bloodied writer beaten by ‘une bande de fachos’ (Collard, 1990: 00:59:00). The gallery becomes both a meeting point and a home. It is reclaimed by the Taggers just as their names are reclaimed through the iterative process of tagging.
In one of the ending scenes, tagging once again uncovers processes of stigmatisation. Velvet stands on a bridge with a shotgun, attempting suicide. Police guns are pointed at him; he sprays black paint on his face. Guillaume Depardieu's light features – blond hair, blue eyes, pale skin – contrast sharply with the dark paint, creating a striking visual. He makes a sudden movement and is immediately shot. Velvet's tagged face, his crime, and death reconnect body and name, written and material, in an act of signing. This self-tagging transforms stigma into an act of defiance, making his body a site of both resistance and visibility. His being shot is stuttercut, emphasising brutality. This act condenses the film's intersectional logic, as racialisation, stigma, urban inscription and institutional violence are brought to bear on a single body.
The striking image of Velvet's face is at once a problematic instance of blackface, and, despite this, a denunciation of police violence. The image of Velvet blurs the abstract/figural binary in a signing that joins body and name. Halberstam notes: ‘political defiance in late capitalism […] takes unexpected forms, seemingly superficial and ludic’ (2005: 224). Tagging, often dismissed as play, here testifies to oppression. His death demonstrates how stigma, danger, and racialisation converge. Despite this problematic use of blackface, we might argue that he symbolically dies for his fellow taggers subjected to aggression and segregation. The paint also gestures toward the future of Velvet and Zina's child, reflecting the challenges imposed on their inter-racial relationship. Drawing on Servière, ‘les peintres, portraitistes: reproduction de la reproduction’ (Servière 1997: 196), this act hints at the socially proscribed life of Velvet and Zina's child.
Ultimately, the police are not investigated for killing Velvet. Sélim gradually confronts police racism, catalysed by Velvet's death, and temporarily leaves the force to visit Algeria. Sélim's conversation with N’Domba prior to Velvet's death had revealed his family history. His mother was Kabyle, and his uncle and father were murdered by the French military during World War II. Sélim adds that the site of their deaths also hosted the torture of resistance fighter Jean-Moulin: ‘en ‘40, la Gestapo s’est installée dans ces bâtiments, c’est là qu’on a torturé Jean-Moulin, dans les sous-sols’. N’Domba echoes a topos of Collard's oeuvre: 11 inevitability, stating ‘L'histoire est une grande boucle mon frère’ (1:25:45). The recurring Arabic term Mektoub (‘c’est écrit’) defines Sélim in Taggers, signalling the pre-written, unchangeable future. In the context of the AIDS epidemic, Mektoub resonates with inevitable death from HIV/AIDS. ‘Stigma’ itself functions as a marker of death, inheriting the ghostly mark (Christ) (‘Stigma’ in Oxford English Dictionary). Velvet's death thus carries a sense of inevitability, portraying him as a victim of unchanging police violence and stigmatisation.
Recording writer culture
By foregrounding how multiple forms of marginalisation intersect in Taggers, this article has offered a model for reading AIDS-era cultural productions beyond single-axis interpretations. It demonstrates that Collard's work represents writer culture – including the practice of tagging – as a strategy for navigating and resisting overlapping forms of marginalisation. Collard depicts writer culture and positions the tag as a signum resisting structures of stigmatisation, highlighting possibilities of resistance to stigmatisation and segregation through the blurring of boundaries enabled by a shared writer culture. This focus on resistance and shared practices may also be connected to how Collard documents and circulates writer culture, capturing its ephemeral forms for a wider audience. Indeed, as I touch on below, while his work is fictional, it hints at writers of its time.
Le Lyonnais gives Collard a restrictive premise, as all episodes follow police investigations, and paradoxically creates space for him to work beyond the label of ‘AIDS-writer’: the pre-set narrative allows his mostly autobiographically influenced work to elude confinement. In parallel, he also shapes the premise of the broader series, Le Lyonnais. Actor Pierre Santini (Morphée) recalls: ‘Cyril nous a poussé un petit peu au bout de nous-mêmes, […] on le voit dans le film, les personnages sont un peu différents’ (in Cazenave and Headline, 1993). The success of Collard's endeavour is nonetheless questionable, as he complains in a diary entry: ‘Presque un an de boulot pour quoiPour que personne ne voit la différence entre ce film […] et le ragnagna série télé habituelle !’ (1993: 199). Collard might thus be said to critique the discrimination suffered by his film at the hands of the ‘high culture’ versus ‘low culture’ hierarchy, which dismisses TV-films.
The process of gallerisation challenges writer culture's aim, as voiced by French artist Invader: ‘It is first of all about liberating Art from its usual alienators that museums or institutions can be’ (Invader, 2014). Stigma, as Tyler shows, plays a role in capitalist expropriation (2020: 17), but writing and graffiti resist exploitation as they play with notions of commercialisation and visibility through their shifting forms and attachment to surfaces. The artwork in Célia's gallery is done in ‘Wildstyle’, aiming to ‘dynamiser la forme des lettres, quitte à en compliquer sa lecture’ (Vecchione, 2004). Indeed, the gallery's graffiti MAGICAL KILLERS bears intricate lettering, decipherable only with prior awareness of the name, thus remaining undecodable for the casual visitor (Collard, 1990: 00:59:20). French artist Bando echoes the importance of engagement in writer culture: ‘C’est uniquement en faisant du graffiti […] que tu peux commencer à comprendre les fioritures du style’ (in Vecchione, 2004). The style of lettering thus resists the exploitation of the message of the graffiti.
Conversely, the ‘Block Letters’ style ‘reste le plus lisible possible’ (Vecchione, 2004). Ali, a character in Taggers who moves towards gallery work, also creates larger street pieces, notably RESISTANCE SYSTEMATIK. Seen at the beginning and end of the TV-film, this piece frames Taggers; it uses two styles of Block Letters for its easily readable words. Placement and environment are crucial: it sits on a mural near Lyon Part-Dieu, a shopping mall and centre of consumerism. Here, RESISTANCE SYSTEMATIK paradoxically leverages commercial visibility while leaving a mark of resistance. Street art engraved into the urban body resists commercialisation. Richard Serra observes: ‘To remove the work is to destroy the work’ (in Michalos, 2007: 179, also in Davis, 2018: 39). Artists such as Banksy refuse to authenticate works cut from their original environments (Davis, 2018: 39). Similarly, Ali in Taggers does not tag or sign RESISTANCE SYSTEMATIK, forbidding its commercialisation, yet its vulnerability is heightened as other writers tag around it. The ephemerality of this piece brings emphasis to the importance of documenting writer culture through a lasting medium.
The dimensions of the creator and that of the character here interact. Collard extends Célia's contribution to creating an intradiegetic space of resistance into an extradiegetic direction. Davis notes: ‘Removed site-specific works can be re-contextualized through photo documentation’ (2018: 40); Collard does so via the TV-film. Following the subway as the initial medium for the geographical spread of tags and graffiti, writer culture turns to new trajectories and media. Collard contributes to the emerging network for circulating writing and reinforcing shared culture – zines and photographic images play a role in this network (Austin, 2001: 250). Collard amplifies the message of writer culture's resistance by offering such a depiction of it on television. 12
Collard offers a depiction of writer culture of his own time. The characters of Taggers are reminiscent of leading rappers and taggers of the time. Interestingly, Velvet and Booker resemble leading members of NTM, Bruno Lopes and Didier Morville (Kool Shen and JoeyStarr). Suprême NTM was known for altercations with police (Shen et al., 2021: 134–144) and for its role in 1990s Parisian writer culture (Chevalier, 2018: n.p.). Kool Shen recalls: ‘NTM, ça a d’abord été un collectif de graffiti artistes, pas un groupe de rap ni un groupe de danse’ (in Shen et al., 2021: 17). 13 Their autobiography recounts the development of NTM in the 1980s; Kool Shen notes: ‘On a déjà commencé à rapper. On doit être en 1989’ (2021: 18). 14 A year later, NTM performed at Olympia, Paris: ‘le 30 avril 1990, on s’est retrouvés à faire la première partie de la Souris Déglinguée à l’Olympia’ (2021: 29), and signed with Sony Music the same year (2021: 29). The rise of NTM overlaps with the production of Taggers. Didier Morville (JoeyStarr) appears in Taggers as a secondary character, primarily in Magical Killers group scenes (Collard, 1990: 0:05:10, 0:06:50).
Taggers concludes with a rap battle, featuring the lyrics: ‘Mon art est pas noir, mon art est pas blanc, il est de toutes les couleurs en même temps’ (Collard, 1990: 01:23:00). An image of RESISTANCE SYSTEMATIK follows, accompanied by a recitation of the names of those who lived resisting the stigma of the racialised, marginalised body, through the song ‘It's a Blax Thanks’. Taggers provides a powerful account of stigma, police violence, and racialised oppression in early 1990s France.
René-Marc Bini, Collard's friend and colleague, recalls the artist's fear of being perceived as ‘quelque chose de figé’ (in Cazenave and Headline, 1993). Collard's oeuvre, in particular the film Taggers – and the tag whose ‘unique constance est peut-être la métamorphose’ (Kokoreff, 1998: 89) – invites renewed interpretation of the artist. In the context of protests against police violence – after Adama Traoré (ISHR 2025) or George Floyd (BBC, 2020) – Collard's nuanced reflections on stigmatisation and racialisation remain highly relevant. Where memorial street art provides a site of resistance and testimony yet is vulnerable to destruction (e.g., a recent Manchester George Floyd mural), Taggers offers a timely and more durable account of resistance through media. The film not only preserves but also extends the political force of street-based practices.
