The Occupation Trilogy: La Place de l'Étoile – The Night Watch – Ring Roads

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As our journey into the future continues — the present moment drifting away, our own biographies lengthening, our pasts receding, inexorably, quietly becoming ‘history’ in the distance — so certain aspects of those retreating eras seem to come more sharply into focus and claim our attention. The longer view allows us to see these features of the recent past as truly defining characteristics of those decades that we’ve lived through.

Take 1968, for example, nearly fifty years ago now, the year that the first novella in Patrick Modiano’s Occupation Trilogy was published. In 1968 I was running my school’s film society. I decided to conclude my tenure of the role with a controversial double bill and duly screened Alain Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad (1961) and Federico Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (1965). I confess the choice was entirely pretentious, a consequence of pure sixth-form pseudo-intellectual bravado, but, while I was genuinely baffled by Marienbad, I was haunted by Juliet of the Spirits — for reasons that defy cogent analysis — and the film remains similarly haunting today, after several further viewings over the years. Something about those two films sums up for me the cultural mood of the 1960s — or at least one aspect of the cultural mood of that time: they are wilfully difficult to understand; they play fast and loose with chronology and ratiocination; the surreal seems more pertinent and familiar than the real. But in those days this seemed intensely stimulating and exciting — we were drawn to an art that occupied the mysterious, the vague and the allusive rather than one that conventionally confronted the blunt realities of the here and now.

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