When Georges Perec was 11, he decided to wander. In fact, escape is perhaps a better description; a jailbreak from his aunt’s house on Rue de l’Assomption. He wandered Paris with who knows what planned. It was such a defining experience for the writer that he later composed a text surrounding the feeling of release and the places he encountered on this lost meander called Les Lieux d’une Fugue, later published posthumously in the volume Je Suis né in 1990 by Seiul. The text was translated as The Scene of a Flight quite recently in the Penguin volume of Species of Space and Other Pieces but, most intriguingly, the text was turned into a short film by Perec in 1978 only a few years before he died.

This forty minute film by Perec contains the majority of the text and finds the author behind the camera; something he was clearly itching to do at this point in his career. That same year he was filmed by a television crew stating such a desire while on set for Alain Corneau’s Série Noire, his screenplay an adaptation of Jim Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman. The potential speed and money in cinema admittedly played into his growing love for working in films as opposed to simply novels (he had, after all, just finished work on the huge Life: A User’s Manuel).

Perec’s film was fully funded by Institut national de l’audiovisuel and Perec seems to have had full freedom to explore a visual response to his own text. Its experimental, essayistic nature is not unlike Alain Resnais’ early documentary films. The cinematic medium also gives the writer a chance to experiment with the audio-visual potential of a fugue itself, intertwining exploration of place, excavation of memory and voice-over with the music of Schumann.

The writer’s story is a melancholy one, the ton being that of an orphan lost in the city. He has little money on him to enact his plan of escape, spending most of it on some milk-bread and a comic book. The essay (and the film) opens with plans to sell his stamp collection, the detail belying Perec’s typical collector’s sense of thinking; something that cannot be faked.

However, all is not well. The stamp collectors usually sat at the market trading in their small, travelled wares are absent on the day of the escape. Perec, in his film, beautifully captures that early morning hum of a city slowly waking up. People are absent with the exception of the cleaners.

That lonely day all of those years back has scarred the writer, though the account is more complicated because nothing necessarily bad happens to him. He gets lost around central Paris, far away from his Aunt’s house in the 16^th arrondissement. He seems reluctant to allow for help from policemen and métro ticket inspectors, only eventually giving up on his quest to savour the feeling of being missed or wanted.

Perec renders the telling of his film in a visually innovative way. Though the journey he recounts is hectic and upsetting for his younger self (all voiced by Jean-Pierre Melville discovery, Marcel Cuvelier), the camera is achingly slow and patient, determined to map every detail of the revisited places. The film is even more of an excavation of memory than in the text. Perec is at pains to show how difficult this experience was for him to revisit, writing ‘And he remained trembling for a long moment, before the blank page (and I remained trembling for a long moment, before the blank page).’

In the film, he begins with a doorway, tracking slowly back. Every element is noted by the camera with an ease I imagine the writer to be envious of. His pages and pages of text, mapping the perception of even the simplest place, is swapped for a single, smooth visual that does the same thing more efficiently. The rest of the film contains these patient qualities, as if Perec is daring himself to revisit an experience that really terrified him and shaped him in ways that are only hinted at; undercurrents that sit between each sentence of his short prose work.

The day has a clear lineage with his future creativity. His obsession with objects and paraphernalia of all kinds seems an extension of his childhood self here, only instead of being disappointed by the lack of stamp sellers on the Champs-Élysées, he creates his own worlds; the everyday scenario is collected, marked, catalogued, maintained, itemised and retained for future trading with his readers. There will always be people around him to show his curios to.

What was Perec really running away from that day? Loneliness? The tedium of school for a meandering mind? It could even have been his aunt. But really it feels most likely to be the loss of his parents and the sense of dislocation allowing him to drift all over Paris in a way someone like Guy Debord could never quite match in earnest; running without destination and with home only present in the official sense, not in the emotional sense. It was the latter sense that mattered.