Georges Perec's Les Lieux d'une fugue (1978)

For three years the young Georges Perec was living with his aunt Esther Bienenfeld and her husband David at a flat at 18 Rue de l'Assomption in the 16e arrondissement. In 1965 he wrote a fifteen-page autobiographical account (Lieux d'une fugue (Runaway Places)) of the day he ran away from the flat at the age of eleven. He turned it into a forty-two minute film in 1978.

The film isn't in chronological order, has no dialogue only voiceover, and contains many images dwelling on tiny details, such as dogshit on benches, a cracked coffee bowl, the goose feather on the letter 'F' on the offices of Le Figaro (as on the 'F' on the newpaper itself), etc. There are shots of metro stations, Carré Marigny stamp market, the Champs-Élysées, Franklin-Roosevelt, rubbish bins and much more.

The point where a man finds the boy trying to sleep on a bench, starts asking him questions and then takes him to the nearest police station comes about halfway through and is ony continued at the end, where we see images of a room in the police station and learn that his uncle has been phoned and will come and pick him up in his car.

At no time is there any attempt to reconstruct Perec's flight as a child himself, only memories of places visited, no one interprets him as a boy, and only a few brief images of Perec himself involved in the film are seen: there is only the voiceover, and as Perec's older cousin Lili used to play the piano at Rue de l'Asssomption, as a memory of this, Schumann's Kreisleriana becomes increasingly predominant as soundtrack.