I’ve long had an uneasy relationship with French filmmaker Yann Gonzalez’s work. His most recent feature, Knife+Heart, is one of the defining genre films of the 2010s and placed him side by side with my personal favorite filmmaker currently working, Bertrand Mandico, as one of Altered Innocence’s strongest pervert warriors. I just don’t know how to square the divine status of that porno-chic erotic thriller with the fact that I gave his previous feature a 2-star review in the first few months of writing for this website. I was frustrated with Gonzalez’s stage-play orgy You and the Night the first time I watched it in 2015, but I had hoped that the following decade of cherishing & championing what his home label Altered Innocence brings to the modern cinema scene would’ve turned me around on it. Unfortunately, I still found it to be a limp bore on a recent rewatch, a whiplash-inducing reaction after the intensely horny thrills of Knife+Heart. It turns out that the key to understanding how Gonzalez arrived at the intoxicating sensory pleasures of his god-tier Cruising riff cannot be found in the cock-tease stasis of his debut feature. To track his aesthetic development in the years before making Knife+Heart, you have to look to his extensive collection of short films, since that’s the medium he most often works in.

The Islands of Yann Gonzalez is an omnibus collection of “7 short films and other works” (mostly music videos) that Gonzalez made in the years leading up to Knife+Heart, published on Blu-ray by Altered Innocence in 2022. As an artist’s portfolio, it’s a much more coherent collection than the sprawling, anything-goes Bertrand Mandico catalog Apocalypse After, published that same year. The auteurist vision of The Islands of Yann Gonzalez is so consistent that it practically functions as an overlong anthology film, especially since the director has so consistently collaborated with his actor/muse of choice Kate Moran (similar to the way Mandico repeatedly deploys Elina Löwensohn as his own on-screen avatar). It’s in this collection of shorts that you get to know Gonzalez as one of the most exciting, hedonistic filmmakers currently working, not just as the out-of-nowhere director of Knife+Heart (and the less-famous brother of hipster musician M83). The only trick is to resist the urge to Shazam every French synthpop needle drop peppered throughout the collection, since it could quickly become a second-screen viewing experience, distracting from his visual artistry. The dream of electroclash is alive & well in Paris, apparently — at least according to these shorts (and to fellow Altered Innocence release Queens of Drama).

The opening short “You Will Never Be Alone Again” is an indie sleaze dance party filmed long before that aughts-era aesthetic was more widely, nostalgically revived. It imagines a French reboot of Skins that, of course, would be a silent arthouse short shot on black & white 16mm film stock. Sweaty teenagers maniacally dance until dawn in a semi-religious, semi-drug-induced frenzy, pausing for brief moments of melancholy mid-party while Gonzalez lights everything with a single flashlight, like he’s documenting a crime scene. It’s more of a mood than a narrative, echoing the extensive music video work that pads out his filmography. We then get a taste of his narrative filmmaking sensibilities in “I Hate You Little Girls,” his first substantial collaboration with his favorite actor (Moran) and his first film about his favorite pet subject: the erotic tension between sex & death. Moran stars as a synthpop punk singer who spends half of her time singing gothy dance tunes in front of porn projectors and the other half mourning her recently deceased, bad-boy boyfriend. It’s a definitive piece for Gonzalez, as it hones in on the exact tone of tragic horniness that would persist throughout his following major works. It’s also got a few unforgettable images, including Moran passed out in the street with a Polaroid of her dead lover stuffed into her see-through mesh panties and a fellow local musician performing a BDSM stage act while costumed as a “Whip It”-era member of DEVO.

The two shorts leading up to “I Hate You Little Girls” were effectively just screen tests for Moran as a cinematic image. “By the Kiss” wordlessly pictures her making out with various scene partners, as if Gonzalez was obsessively playing with his new favorite doll on camera. “Intermission” is a more illuminating text, in which Moran and fellow Gonzalez regular Pierre Vincent Chapus lean against a brick wall and wonder aloud what they could do “to avoid being bored, to avoid being boring.” It’s here that Gonzalez announces his adherence to the principles later codified by Bertrand Mandico’s “Incoherence Manifesto,” defining cinema as a mechanism that allows the audience “to forget time, to get lost in images.” “I Hate You Little Girls” ends on a supernatural image that breaks from reality to instead traffic in pure dream logic, but that guiding principle to not bore audiences with real-world logic only continues to escalate in subsequent shorts. “Three Celestial Bodies” finds lost souls having a melancholic threeway with a kind of Sex Christ on a music video set, while He bleeds out of a wound just above a tattoo of Marcel Duchamp’s autograph. Gonzalez’s signature short “Islands” is a fully supernatural fantasia composed of increasingly perverted, despondent sex acts, blurring the line between fantasy & reality with grotesque monster movie makeup. Even my initial, disappointed review of You and the Night acknowledged the intoxicating potency of its dream logic imagery, citing “a green screen motorcycle ride, an Alice in Wonderland style ballet, and a trip to a phantom movie theater” as welcome breaks from the listless swingers’ party segments that drag down the energy. And, of course, Knife+Heart had that mystic twink character who was inexplicably part bird, whatever that means.

Of Altered Innocence’s two trademark filmmakers, I’m still overall more convinced of Bertrand Mandico’s genius as a perverted surrealist, an illusionist unafraid to break away from the boring confines of real-world logic to drown his audience in the sensory pleasures of a hedonistic otherworld. Look to any stray frame of The Wild Boys or She is Conann to see a more ecstatic, less restrained version of what Gonzalez is doing in his most extreme moments of fantasy. However, this collection of shorts has totally reshaped my big-picture view of Gonzalez’s work, which is typically more focused on creating a sweaty dance party atmosphere than getting lost in the poetry of the artform. His synthpop sex romps are grimy, decadent searches for pleasure in a world haunted by dead & violent lovers. No good orgiastic dance party is complete without an It Girl at the center of the room, of course, so it’s a godsend he found the effortlessly hip, chic Moran so early in his career to help set the tone. The only thing I still can’t figure out is why the energy was so low in his debut feature, which has all the right reprobates, tunes, and costumes to make for a classic Gonzalez sex party but ends up feeling like the first hour of a middle school dance instead, the hour when everyone in the gymnasium is afraid to look at or touch each other. No matter; he’s delivered heaps of hedonistic ecstasy and classic French melancholy in every project before & since, so it’s easy to forgive the misstep.

-Brandon Ledet