Between the global and the national: Reading place and non-place in El hombre de al lado/The Man Next Door (Cohn and Duprat 2009)

Abstract

This article analyses the spatial logic of the Argentine film El hombre de al lado/The Man Next Door (2009) directed by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat by using Marc Augé’s categories of place and non-place. In the film, neighbours Leonardo and Víctor fight over the building of a window in Víctor’s apartment that will face Leonardo’s home and modern architecture exemplar, the Curutchet House – a house built by renowned architect Le Corbusier. The tension between Leonardo and Víctor can be better understood as a tension between the global and the national, and how their particular perspectives match how they see the Curutchet House itself, either as non-place or place. The article proposes the non-place/anthropological place entanglement as a useful tool to understand how subjects interact with a given space, and how such interactions can be read as favouring one type of relationship or another, space as place or space as non-place, in practices of textual critique. Reading El hombre de al lado, this article pays close attention to how the protagonists, Víctor and Leonardo, occupy space in the film, whether as place or non-place, and read this contingent relationship as a commentary on the tension between the global and the national.