Indiana University Bloomington
Communication and Culture

-Narrative Constructions in Tom Tykwer’s Run, Lola, Run-

by:
Simone Donecker

2005

On the other hand, I believe that time itself can be ruled in films generally. You can just do everything you like. You can stretch time. Usually what film does is to tell a whole life in ninety minutes, or one week in ninety minutes.
So I thought it would be interesting, especially in Lola, to stretch time out and tell twenty minutes in one and a half hours and see what happens then. You stretch it out and suddenly you see all these little spaces in between, you can look into small channels in this stretched time period.
Which allowed me to follow different lines of the story, to say „What’s this person doing by the way?“ or „What’s happening to that one?“? And then you just follow this life for a moment. I love the contradiction. You′re only able to do this in movies because in real life it always has the same rhythm, a second stays a second, a minute stays a minute.
We can′t help it, we can′t go back in time, unless we have the machine that Michael J. Fox has.
Tom Tykwer¹

Run, Lola, Run by Tom Tykwer (1998) is a cinematically innovative film that departs in many ways from usual standards of narrative construction by using a wide range of filmmaking techniques. Although its unique graphic and audio representation as well as its plot technique confronts stereotypes that are produced by Hollywood, it can also be associated with principles of classical narrative form.

In this paper I will discuss the complex structure and narrative of the movie as well as its extensive self-reflexivity by focusing on its different ramifications in art cinema, counter-cinema and classical Hollywood cinema.

In an interview on a Belgian film website David Bordwell argues that a lot of films which seem to be unusual and innovative are actually rooted in the spirit of classical cinema:

A movie like Lola Rennt for instance, which is very experimental in some ways, is in many ways also very traditional. Beginning-middle-end, she gets three chances, the last one is the right one, she looks at the audience in the end and acknowledges it′s all been a game... I mean, this is very much in the spirit of classical cinema.²

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1 http://www.projecta.net/tykwer.htm

2 http://www.kutsite.com/drie/drie52b_eng.html