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Marquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled SpacesMain MenuIntroductionMarquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled SpacesIntroduction, StartMarquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled SpacesHistories ConcealedHistories Concealed landing pageProjecting 1943Sense of PachucaBroadway as BackgroundSplash page for Broadway as Background / Background as BroadwayPhoto Essay: Marquee StoriesIntro to photo essay: Marquee StoriesPrototypesExploring project prototypesPortfolioEjected Spectators and Inactive Users: Locating Multimodal Historiography In Repurposed Media SpacesVeronica Paredesf39d262eb7e9d13906fe972f3e5494dbae1896bc
Low lives, street toughs, and punk tramps
12015-05-30T18:19:33-07:00Veronica Paredesf39d262eb7e9d13906fe972f3e5494dbae1896bc34298Broadway as grotesque in Kindergarten Copplain2015-05-30T18:57:06-07:00Veronica Paredesf39d262eb7e9d13906fe972f3e5494dbae1896bcFeatured as representative of Downtown Los Angeles, this scene’s characters are tellingly identified as “Punk Tramp,” “Low Life #1-4,” and “Street Tough #1-3” in the film’s closing credits. The moment Kimble exits his car on the 500 block of South Broadway, he immediately witnesses a woman being slapped to the ground, and is then propositioned with a “hey baby” from a scantily clad “punk tramp.” In these first thirty seconds on Broadway, the film depicts downtown LA so grotesquely that it moves into caricature.
What underlies this depiction of downtown Los Angeles as a site of criminality and violence? There are clues in the language heard and seen on the street, and additionally in the ethnic and racial identities of the stereotyped characters featured in the space. For instance, the scene’s opening action involves a Latino man slapping and throwing a woman to the ground while a crowd comprised solely of men of color watch without intervening. While the explicit display of violence characterizes the location as unsafe, it also associates the characters’ racial and ethnic identities with this violence and this space. Most of the characters in both this clip and the Arcade scene on Broadway are Black, Latino, or Asian. Furthermore, except for a handful of token children of color in Kimble’s Oregon classroom, these broad caricatures are the only persons of color represented in the entire film; not one of them is a main or supporting character, and only three are even granted the most trivial amount of dialogue.
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12015-05-30T10:00:07-07:00Veronica Paredesf39d262eb7e9d13906fe972f3e5494dbae1896bcSchwarzenegger on Broadway3After his partner’s failed attempt to convince a murder witness to testify against the film’s villain Cullen Crisp, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s John Kimble uses a more aggressive method of persuasion. Kimble inexplicably finds Cindy (the witness) in a seedy club on South Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles.plain2015-05-30T23:18:35-07:00Veronica Paredesf39d262eb7e9d13906fe972f3e5494dbae1896bc