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

Time, Place, and Character Subjectivity in Run Lola Run 139concentric moment of musical measure which gives rise to issues of changeand repetition, identity and difference, contrast and continuity.According to Lefebvre’s understanding of the term, rhythm is not to be confusedwith “movement [mouvement], speed, a sequence of movements [gestes]or objects (machines, for example)” (Lefebvre 2004, p. 5). Instead, he generallydefines rhythm as emerging everywhere “where there is interactionbetween a place, a time and an expenditure of energy” (2004, p. 15). Thisdefinition allows Lefebvre to establish a number of subcategories which formintegral parts of the analysis of rhythm: repetition (of movements, gestures,actions, situations, differences); interferences of linear processes andcyclical processes; birth, growth, peak, then decline and end.In rhythm, the repetitive and the differential go hand in hand (Lefebvre2004, p. 6), as Lefebvre asserts. And this is because “[r]hythm reunites quantitativeaspects and elements, which mark time and distinguish momentsin it – and qualitative aspects and elements, which link them together, foundthe unities and result from them. Rhythm appears as regulated time, governedby rational laws, but in contact with what is the least rational in humanbeing: the lived, the carnal, the body” (2004, p. 9). In this sense, rhythmsescape logic, but they also contain a logic, “a possible calculus of numbersand numerical relations,” because “we know that a rhythm is slow or livelyonly in relation to other rhythms” (2004, pp. 10–11).Bypassing a whole array of implications (as, e.g., the crucial distinctionbetween “present” and “presence” 10 ) that Lefebvre’s rhythmanalytical projectbrings with it, in the context of our present narratological concerns itcan help us to radically refigure the complex spatio-temporal organizationthat we find in Run Lola Run. Instead of foregrounding, as Bordwell does,the cognitive aspects of narrative comprehensibility, and the disguisedpersistence of linearity as the film’s basic concern and organizing principle,Lefebvre’s approach makes us attentive to those dimensions of space,time, and subjective experience opened up by rhythms, repetitions, andintervals. Lefebvre’s analytical categories suggest to transcend the narrativelevel and to cut the structure of the three forking-path futures across therepetition of instantaneous moments in order to grasp Run Lola Run’s rhythmicalstructure as a complementary organizing principle of the filmic construction.Instead of dividing the film according to a sequence of plot pointsor a number of narrative branching points, we are now prepared to dissectit along the rhythmical recurrence of events, as prominent markers ofthe process of narration: Lola’s screams, her various street encounters with