Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 is an archival database novel and a multimedia documentary on 20th-century urban development in Los Angeles first published in 2003.

Based on research by Norman M. Klein, it features a novella written by Klein and an interactive interface programmed by Rosemary Comella and Andreas Kratky. It was co-produced by The Labyrinth Project at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California and the ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medien – Karlsruhe. This film accompanies a new edition of Bleeding Through, entitled Norman M. Klein's »Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles«: An Updated Edition 20 Years Later, edited by Jens Martin Gurr, published by transcript early in 2023.

For this film, the interface was operated by Jens Martin Gurr; image and sound capture, filming and editing by Jochen Ehlert of the Center for Information and Media Services (ZIM) at the University of Duisburg-Essen. In cooperation with Norman M. Klein and by permission of Norman M. Klein and rights holder ZKM.

For a film on Bleeding Through by Lisa-Marie Krosse and Jan Niederprüm entitled How to Make this into a Movie - Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986, including an interview with Norman M. Klein, see    • How to Make this into a Movie 

Norman Klein, Rosemary Comella & Andreas Kratky

Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920 – 1986,

2003, video documentation of the interactive media novel, 2023, 44 min.  

produced by Jens Martin Gurr

Jens Martin Gurr

Professor of British and Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, since 2007. He is the author or co-author of six monographs, including Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City (Routledge, 2021), and (with Julia Hoydis and Roman Bartosch), Climate Change Literacy (Cambridge University Press [Elements series], 2023). His book Understanding Public Debates: What Literary Studies Can Do (An Argument and Six Case Studies) came out with Routledge in June 2006. He is currently completing on a monograph Historicizing the Enlightenment Controversy: The Literary Self-Enlightenment of the Enlightenment. He edited the 2023 new edition of Norman Klein's Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986 (transcript). In addition to English and American literary history from the 17th to the 21 century, a longstanding research interest has been in public functions of narrative: In this vein, a number of publications study the role of narrative in urban development, in climate change communication and in the dynamics of conflicts. He is currently co-leading a project on "Cultures of Compromise". Jens Gurr is a member of the UDE University Council and of the Board of Trustees of the Volkswagen Foundation. In research, teaching and administration, a consistent concern has been to define and strengthen the role of the humanities in academia and in society generally.