Bleeding Through

Norman M. Klein, »Bleeding Through, Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986«, is an interactive DVD-ROM exploring the ideas of renowned cultural historian Norman Klein. A loosely constructed documentary underlying a flexible literary journey, it is an urban bricolage held together by the outline of a novel spanning sixty-six years. At the center is Molly - based on a real-life person - who may be hiding a murder. She lives within a three-square-mile area near downtown Los Angeles, a death zone where more cinematic murders have been committed than anywhere else in the world. This neighborhood, one of the most complex ethnographic districts in the United States, is represented in Hollywood movies, urban legends and real-estate boosterism in ways that erase the lived ethnographic reality. Out of this rich blend of narratives, users must decide what to include and what to leave out so that their own version of the story will become legible.

The package further includes Norm an Klein's novella »Bleeding Through«. The book and the DVD-ROM together function as an interactive pair of investigative partners -like Holmes and Watson, except neither is positioned as the side kick. The collaborative interplay across media - film, literature, photography, journalism, digital documentary - expands the narrative and investigative fields both in the book and DVD-ROM, enabling readers and users to probe a rich trans-media network of interwoven plots, both IiteraI and metaphoric, literary and conspiratorial. As Norman Klein puts it, “Collective urban memory, like guilt, bleeds through, but elegantly, very tangibly.“