in: Screening the Americas: Narration of Nation in Documentary Film/Proyectando las Américas: Narración de la nación en el cine documental. Ed. Josef Raab, Sebastian Thies, Daniela Noll-Opitz. Trier and Tempe, AZ: WVT and Bilingual Press, 2011. 153-171. The Politics of Representation in Hypertext DocuFiction: Multi-Ethnic Los Angeles as an Emblem of 'America' in Norman M. Klein's Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986 Jens Martin Gurr Consider this: the computer is fundamentally an aesthetics of assets. … Thus, if ever there were an aporetic model of story, it is the digital. However, we must never trust any use of aporia that suggests it is a problem to be solved. That is like saying that unreliable narrators are a problem, rather than the heart of the modern novel. … Perhaps we have lost the sense of what gives story presence: Absence. … I came up with a model that captures the immersive power of a Balzac novel or a stream-of-consciousness journey through a city (Musil, Joyce, Proust, even Melville – the ship as city – and Virginia Woolf). The structure works like this: … Each tier [of the DVD] comments on a specific medium that tries to make the city intelligible as it erases, collectively forgets, survives from day to day. The history of forgetting is a distraction from the basic reality of urban life in Los Angeles, its quotidian power of survival. (Klein, "Bleeding Through" 42) 1. Introduction How does one represent, synchronically as well as diachronically, the complexity of Los Angeles, city of Hollywood myths and inner-city decay, of ceaseless self-invention and bulldozed urban renewal, of multi-ethnic pluralism and ethnic ghettos, a city where both the promises and problems of 'America' have crystallized to the present day? For while the discourses of urban utopia and urban crisis with all their contradictory ideological implications, of course, are as old as the concept of 'city' itself (cf. Mumford, Gassenmeier and Teske), Los Angeles has always been imagined in particularly polarized ways: According to your point of view, Los Angeles is either exhilarating or nihilistic, sun- drenched or smog-enshrouded, a multicultural haven or a segregated ethnic concentration camp – Atlantis or high capitalism – and orchestrating these polarized alternatives is an urban identity thriving precisely on their interchangeability. (Murphet 8) 1 Los Angeles, of course, has long been a center of attention for urbanists as well as for scholars of urban planning and of cultural representations of the city. It has been the subject of innumerable studies, the locale for countless novels, documentary films and particularly of countless feature films. 2 However, one of the most impressive renderings of the complexities of 20th-century Los Angeles, and surely one of the most ambitious attempts to do justice to these complexities by presenting a wealth of material in a highly self-conscious form of hypertext, is Norman M. Klein's multi-media docu-fiction Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986. 3 . 1 This passage is also cited in Bénézet 56. 2 From among the innumerable studies cf. for instance Davis, Fulton, Klein, Forgetting, Murphet, Scott & Soja, Soja, Thirdspace, "Exopolis", and "Los Angeles", Ofner & Siefert. 3 Largely written by Klein and 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.