Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

6Backbeat and Overlap:Time, Place, and CharacterSubjectivity in Run Lola RunMichael WedelWhen Run Lola Run (Lola rennt) premiered in 1998, it became an instantbox-office success in Germany and has subsequently enjoyed large-scale internationaldistribution (Jaeckel 2003, pp. 121–3). Almost single-handedly, thefilm elevated its director, Tom Tykwer, to the top ranks of narrative avantgardefilmmaking in Europe and has since become the emblem of a substantialartistic renewal within contemporary German cinema (Töteberg1999; Garwood 2002). A kinetic tour de force through Berlin driven by aheart-stopping techno beat, packed with unexpected twists and turns,combining still photography, video technology, and animation sequences,Run Lola Run is notable for its way of telling a very simple story – Lolamust find 100,000 DM within 20 minutes in order to save her boyfriendManni – in an extremely complex fashion.In what follows, I want to consider the film’s storytelling techniques asconstituting a particular mode of narration that reconfigures temporal linearityand circularity, action and causality, movement and stasis aroundthe central problems of embodied subjectivity, spatio-temporal intervals,and hetero-topic experience. Taking a Bordwellian theory of cinematicnarration as its starting point, this chapter sets out to remodel the film’saudiovisual organization and spectatorial address across the doublematrix of, one the one hand, Foucault’s notions of the “limit-experience”and hetero-topic and hetero-chronic subjectivity; and, on the other,Henri Lefebvre’s methodological tool of “Rhythmanalysis.” On the basis ofrereading Run Lola Run along these concepts, I argue that an analysis ofthe film’s sequential ordering of the story events, as provided by Bordwell,needs to be complemented and counterbalanced with an understandingof its overarching narrative rhythms and frequencies as equally significantlevels of narration.