Norman M. Klein: Bleeding Through

A loosely constructed documentary underlying a flexible literary journey, Bleeding Through is an urban bricolage held together by the outline of a novel spanning 66 years. An interactive DVD-ROM, it explores the ideas of renowned cultural historian Norman Klein. At the center of the story is Molly--based on a real-life person--who may be hiding a murderer. 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--thus the reader discovers how fictions are concocted and misinformation disseminated.

Norman M. Klein is a professor at the California Institute of the Arts, and the author of The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory and Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon. A critic, historian, and novelist, he has written extensively on the culture and politics of Los Angeles, on cinema, and on architecture.