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Time, Place, and Character Subjectivity in Run Lola Run 135close-up of both her face and her gun, and thereby made explicit to, andthus doubled by, the viewer. Furthermore, the temporalities within eachindividual episode are in themselves far too complex and convoluted –perforated and punctuated as they are by jump cuts, discontinuities onvarious levels, internal repetitions, snapshot bits and pieces, slow and fastmotion shots – for one to really speak, as Bordwell does in his first definition,of each forking path as being organized in a strictly “linear” fashion. 5Bordwell contends that, in Run Lola Run, “each path, after it diverges, adheresto a strict line of cause and effect” (Bordwell 2002, p. 92). This has its cause,as I would claim, less in an internal linearization of narrative time thanin a conception of cinematic time and space informed by movement andrhythmicality and, in the final analysis, radically diverging from linear orchronological temporal modes.It is therefore exactly on the grounds of a reconsideration of cinematicrhythm and sound that I think Bordwell’s set of conventions and his readingof Run Lola Run need to be complemented. This is what I want to devotethe remainder of this chapter to, by drawing our attention to how musicand sound effects establish another, more intricate and paradoxical temporallogic of extreme rhythmicality (characterized by the oppositionbetween repetition and the linear forward drive), the orchestration ofmodulations and singular aural events (the acoustic punctum) and sonicintervals. The second half of this essay will then relate Run Lola Run’s acousticdimension to a broader model of understanding and analyzing rhythmproposed by Henri Lefebvre, before finally turning to Foucault in order tofurther conceptualize not only the film’s spatio-temporal organization, butalso its particular mode of spectatorial address.Run Lola Run’s Musical and Temporal SpineRun Lola Run begins with the ticking sound of a clock, before we even getto see the first image – of the clock itself, or is it another clock? At anyrate, it is the regular rhythm of time, not necessarily chronological, however,which sets into motion the film’s action, or rather: a visual illustrationof the concept of rhythm, split between the pendulum and the gothicwall-clock. Already with those two emblems of time, a tension is createdbetween the rhythmical measure of linear or chronological time, therepetitive rhythm of cyclical or looped temporality (the movement of thependulum) and the event of the single beat (the temporal punctum).