Marquee survivals: a multimodal historiography of cinema's recycled spaces

This project focuses on the significance of the everyday practices of Los Angeles’ South Broadway for media and cinema studies. It explores how shoppers, moviegoers, and vendors have made contributions to the preservation of movie theaters in Downtown Los Angeles that are frequently disregarded. Alongside the social and material practices that preserve the street’s built spaces, the project also illustrates how the street is imagined by various groups through surveys of photographic and cinematic representations of crowds that have historically populated South Broadway, both inside and outside its theaters. Taking movie theater use, reuse and representation seriously can expand dominant understandings of cinema histories, and facilitate embracing what media historiography, Chicano/a Studies, and urban practices reveal about the entangled relationships cinema has not only with other media forms, but also with the social, economic, cultural, and historical dimensions of everyday life. ❧ As a multimodal project, this dissertation uses different discursive modes to create a collection of audio-visual materials that evoke the fragmentary nature of the archive. This approach assumes that there is intellectual value in the seemingly unrelated details hailed by a research question whose various connections can be productively explored through multimodal forms of scholarship. The project also uses image and text, video annotations and commentaries, video and photo essays, to evoke the overlooked presence of South Broadway’s racialized audiences.