Photo Essay: Marquee Stories
Oral histories with cinema audience members...consistently tell us that the local rhythms of motion picture circulation and the qualities of the experience of cinema attendance were place-specific and shaped by the continuities of life in the family, the workplace, the neighbourhood and community.
In his introductory essay to Explorations in New Cinema History, Richard Maltby identifies critical ways that distinguish new cinema history from reception studies. Crucially, the former recognizes the social and spatial in experiences of cinemagoing, rather than limiting analysis of the engagement audiences experience with cultural texts by focusing on interpretation or decoding. Much of the literature currently identifying with new cinema history focuses on the connections enacted with other places and practices through the simple act of moviegoing, linking the spaces and places of cinema to community, personal and cultural memory, class identification and mobility, and ethnic and/or national identification. Future research on this topic would do well to more fully engage practices of oral history, but ideally with the combined efforts of “archival research in corporate records and local and trade press” -- specifically in Spanish-language press, as Laura Isabel Serna and Colin Gunckel have explored for the first half of the twentieth century -- and “tracking [of] programming and exhibition patterns” in order to produce a “social geography” of Downtown Los Angeles’ Spanish-language cinemas throughout the 1970s and 80s. This section gestures toward this framework, while making no claims to accuracy or authenticity of cultural memory. Included are excerpts from one set of interviews conducted with Francisco (Pancho), who currently works at the Million Dollar Farmacia with his wife, Lizbeth; and Rafael, who ran the Discoteca 2000 video stall in the Broadway Arcade until relocating to the Broadway Trade Center in 2014. Both men worked at or near the Million Dollar Theatre after arriving in the United States from Mexico in the 1980s.
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- Title Page & Table of Contents Veronica Paredes
