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

140 Michael Wedelthe nuns, the tramp, the ambulance, the passing of the underground train,the dialogue between her father and his lover, and so on. On the film’s macrolevel,the action of each of the three branching plots is temporally encasedin the interval of the phone receiver and long fall back on the cradle. Clockedand synchronized on numerous parallel and multiply overlapping levels,each new moment opens up a different interval, an in-between space ofmovements, gestures, actions, situations, differences. At the extremes ofthe alternative measures that divide and subdivide the film into events,rhythms, and intervals, emerge two temporal dimensions: on the onehand, the horizon of the macro-interval, which is the film itself or, at least,its fictional universe. For, after all, everything we see within the diegeticworld – if one can speak of something like a diegesis in Run Lola Run –occurs within the never-closed interval opened up by the security guardshooting off the ball. At the other end of the spectrum there is thePolaroid snapshot and the still image as the smallest possible units ofthe cinematic representation of time. In between those two extremes thekinetic experience of Run Lola Run can be reconsidered to unfold by a permanentmodulation, alternation, and interference of different speeds andfrequencies. For Tykwer himself it was “absolutely clear ( . . . ) that a filmabout the possibilities inherent in life had to be a film about the possibilitiesinherent in film as well. That’s why the film contains colour andblack and white, slow motion and time lapse, in other words, all the basiccomponents which have been used throughout film history” (Tykwer inTöteberg 1998, p. 131). As Lutz Koepnick has pointed out, it is not leastthe radically heterogeneous materiality of the narrative discourse inTykwer’s “filmic ruminations” that defines its mode of spectatorial addressas historically contingent, because “it opens a fragmented image space in thepresent in whose ruptures and discontinuities we can reinsert the possibilityof meaningful narration, understood here as an open-ended activitythat in establishing connections – connections between people, objects,sites, and different temporalities – allows us to recuperate a sense for thealeatory and transitional nature of historical time” (Koepnick 2004, p. 127).A Drama of EmplacementThere are at least three thematic markers with which the film reflects thecontingency of its historical time and place as aleatory and transitional.Apart from the struggle between capitalism and love, two central thematic