The place of the heart: Scaling spaces in robert guédiguian’s cinema

Robert Guédiguian once described himself as a ‘district film-maker’, for the reason that most of his films are set and shot in the peripheral and proletarian area of Estaque, north of Marseilles. From his productive and geographical peripheral position, Guédiguian offers an interesting lens through which to look at questions of broad sociocultural interest, such as the demise of all-encompassing ideologies and the crisis of the Left; the development of a post-class and post-industrial society; the evolution of family and community; and the transformation of the urban fabric. In this article, I claim that Guédiguian’s main topic is the demise of ‘place’, as the locus of the development of feelings of belonging and identity. With the backdrop of the question of the ‘end of geography’ – the irrelevance of place in the contemporary socio-economic and technological contexts – I examine Guédiguian’s spatial discourse through a scale that goes from the local to the global, considering all of his films, and paying special attention to À la place du coeur/Where the Heart Is (1998).