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148 Michael Wedel10 For Lefebvre’s distinction between presence and the present, see Lefebvre (2004,p. 47).11 For example, Margit Sinka, quoted in Flinn (2003, p. 208).12 As Lefebvre points out, the rhythmical orchestration of the city is the mostcomplex phenomenon imaginable: “the music of the City, a scene thatlistens to itself, an image of the present of a discontinuous sum. [. . .] Nocamera, no image or series of images can show these rhythms” (2004, p. 36).13 Foucault sketched contemporary space (in the age of structuralism) as a spaceof “Emplacement [. . .] defined by the relations of proximity between pointsor elements” (2000, p. 176): “We do not live in a void that would be tingedwith shimmering colors, we live inside an ensemble of relations that defineemplacements that are reducible to each other and absolutely nonsuperposable”(2000, p. 178). Instead of an attempt at describing in a comprehensivefashion “the set of relations that define emplacements of transit, streets,trains,” Foucault was especially interested in utopias and heterotopias astwo types of spaces “which are linked with all the others, and yet at variancesomehow with all the other emplacements” (2000, p. 178).14 In this respect, the narrative logic of Run Lola Run can be seen as being caughtin the dialectic of entrapment and escape that one can also find in Tykwer’sother films. See Schlipphacke (2006, p. 109).15 In his characterization of the limit-experience, Foucault stressed its transgressivequality, and he chose precisely the metaphors of the “spiral” and the “flashof lightning,” motifs which figures prominently in Run Lola Run’s visual logic,to describe the transgressive act at the core of the limit-experience. SeeFoucault (2000, p. 74). For a detailed discussion of Foucault’s notion of thelimit-experience and its relation to aesthetic experience, see Jay (2005,pp. 390–400).16 For a recent discussion of the idea of the “spatialization” of time in postmodernistart, see Jameson (2003).17 According to a Foucauldian conception of different temporal regimescoexisting in social reality, “time can be seen as a stratified flow composed oftemporalities proceeding at various speeds, as a string of immobile blocksseparated by swift breaks, as a succession of exploding events, as a series ofsequences progressing in spirals, as an oriented length of time followinganother length of time subjected to a slow systemic drift, or as a present whichraises vertically its practices of liberty. Time has changing faces according tothe objects whose transformation it measures (dividing practices of reason,rules of knowledge generation, apparatus of power-knowledge discipliningthe bodies, productions of moral subjects), but these objects are themselveschosen accordingly to moral and political projects” (Michon 2002, p. 185).18 Both Evans (2004) and Schlipphacke (2006) read the film’s ending as a happyending without any sense of ambivalence.