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The discovery of absences (lacks, lacunae) and their definition must in turn lead the filmmaker as composer to the subsequent wager against them – to fill these lacks with that which is not —Yves de Laurot   I YVES DE LAUROT, WHERE ARE YOU?   An old guidebook tells me that in the 1930s MacDougal Alley, a block of mews behind the north side of Washington Square, was the only street in New York City still illuminated by gas lamps Last night I went to a party in one of the quaint, two-storey houses that line its cobblestone length At one point I found myself in a quiet corner where the host was showing off a series of photographs he’d taken at various nightclubs in the early 1980s In several black-and-white flash-lit images I noticed, among a group of dissolute-looking people seated on a banquette, a man I recognised as one of my neighbours He was a strange figure who’d sparked my curiosity for years and I jumped at this chance to discover more about him   Responding to my questioning, the photographer-host said he thought the man was a Marxist filmmaker who had directed – or at least had somehow been involved with – a famous European political thriller of the late 1960s He couldn’t remember the name of the film As he spoke, I experienced a kind of mental gasp This response to my casual inquiry opened up a pathway between two distantly separated parts of my life Marxist filmmaker, European, involved with late ’60s political thrillers – the man in the photograph sounded exactly like the elusive Yves de Laurot, the filmmaker engagé whom my friend Terry Berne and I had fleetingly encountered (and ever since wondered about) when we were teenagers in California How amazing, I thought, if de Laurot had ended up, all these years later, as my next-door neighbour And how amazing, as well (and perhaps even more so), to discover this fact in so haphazard a manner, glancing through some nightclub snapshots in the middle of a party at a stranger’s house on MacDougal Alley   I would usually see