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Time, Place, and Character Subjectivity in Run Lola Run 131his choice from a menu of different avatars as fictional alter-egos. 2 In asimilar vain, the animated title sequence is designed as if seen from a perspectivefamiliar from first-person shooter games. Finally, “the most clearcutresemblance to the virtual world of computer games resides in the keynarrative device of the film, namely Lola’s three ‘lives’ ” (Evans 2004, p. 109).Although there is no space here to fully explore the film’s manifold referencesto the intertext of the computer game, we can assume it providesa key cultural model for the degree to which its overall conception ofnarrative structure, diegetic space, and character agency can be calledinnovative. 3Apart from the fluent transition from photographic film to animatedsequences, and the internal montage or juxtaposition of in-focus/outof-focusmaterial as well as animated inserts, the first 10 minutes of RunLola Run introduce a whole range of visual modalities of different materialstatus and ontological provenance: with the transition from one temporallayer to the next, 35mm film changes into grainy video footage, colorto monochrome black-and-white, normal speed into slow motion orartificially accelerated action. Whereas one is tempted to relate those differentvisual ontologies to different temporal layers (35mm, normal speed,color for the present tense; manipulation of speed and black-and-whitefor the past; snapshots for the future), or to different levels of reality(where black and white snapshots of still images would represent mentalactivity and subjective memory or fantasy), or, indeed, understand themas a particular mode of character focalization, 4 the film as a whole is consistentonly in complicating and disorienting any such straightforwardattempts at identifying one-to-one relationships between the materialityof the signifier and the time and reality status of the signified at a givenmoment.Three CyclesMaybe also due to these complexities on the micro-level of Run Lola Run’smode of narration, commentators have largely focused on what also constitutedthe film’s major audience appeal and cult value, namely its narrativeconstruction on the macro-level, characterized by what appears to bea time-loop structure of Lola’s three attempts to come up with the moneyand save her boyfriend, aptly called “Manni” (and here, as so often, nomenest omen), from certain death: