La fiction cinématographique comme outil d’auto-représentation pour les rappeurs français depuis 2015

Since 2015, French rappers have had to diversify their approaches in order to capitalize on the unprecedented popularity their art form has enjoyed in recent years. Among these strategies, image and film have become central to the challenges of self-representation, and taking control of the camera is gradually becoming a recurring theme : The duo PNL built a fictional narrative that amassed millions of views across four consecutive music videos promoting their album Dans la légende (2016), Lacrim released the episodes of his series Force et Honneur (2017–2018), named after his album released the same year, on YouTube. In total, twenty-two fictional films (ranging from series to short-, medium-, and feature-length films) were released online and even in theaters between 2015 and 2025. The multiple influences and shared creative conditions of these works allow them to be studied as fully hybrid objects, drawing their aesthetic resources from both cinema and music video practices, while differing from each in several respects. Studying this ever-growing phenomenon allows us to better understand recent evolutions in the relationship between rap and cinema in France, as well as to gain deeper insight into the various visual techniques used to represent rappers over the last decade.