Throughout this project, I focus on the significance of everyday practices and the people of South Broadway, on how shoppers, moviegoers and vendors made small but important contributions to the preservation of movie theaters in Downtown Los Angeles. The cinematic representation of the crowds that populate South Broadway, inside and outside its theaters, is a significant factor in how the street is imagined. This project considers movie theater use, reuse and representation as a means of expanding our understanding of cinema histories, embracing what media historiography, Chicano/a Studies, and urban practices can reveal about the entangled relationships cinema has not only with other media forms, but also with the social, economic, and cultural dimensions of everyday life.

As a multimodal project, MARQUEE SURVIVALS uses different discursive modes to create a collection of audio-visual materials that evoke the fragmentary nature of the archive and the “eccentricity of the past.” This approach assumes that there is intellectual value in the seemingly unrelated or insignificant details of a research question whose various implications can be productively explored through multimodal forms of scholarship. As Steve Anderson has noted, “If we are to speak meaningfully about the heterogeneity of the past, our method must be likewise heterogeneous” (16). The project uses image and text, video annotations and commentaries, video and photo essays, to evoke the ephemeral contributions and overlooked presence of South Broadway’s racialized audiences.

Along the current Introduction path, you will find more context for South Broadway as this project's key area of study, and a more detailed description of what other paths contain.