Although Run Lola Run has a discontinuous style – made of many types of cinematic images, including color, black and white, animation, video and still shots – it is held together as a whole by following rules of continuity to keep the viewer oriented in the fragmented spaces and times.
How does the movie retain narrative momentum despite all the time shifts? What narrative forces/desires drives the edits of shot to shot? In what ways is time “stretched” or “compressed” and how is the effect achieved? These questions are only “prompts” for your own thoughts about the narrative, cinematography and editing styles of the Run Lola Run.
Near the beginning of the movie, after her phone call with Manni, Lola throws her telephone into the air. Time is slowed as the phone falls down, conveying how fast she moves through the apartment. This stretching of time prepares the viewer for this funky tale that takes liberties of slowing down and speeding up shots.
Moving through the apartment after Lola closes the door, it pans back through. After a line from her mother, the camera moves into the living room to show Lola in a different way.
The transition into this scene is wonderful, it rotates toward the television in the real world to then zoom into the television with the animation of Lola running down the stairs outside of the apartment this shot starts in. In the terms of time compression, throughout each of the loops, hand drawn animation pushes Lola forward in time by speeding up her movements and actions faster than humanely possible. It keeps the movie going forward, even with the significant repetition. Instead of taking the time to show how Lola interacts with the neighbor and the dog, we get a quick and snappy animation showing the difference between the time loops. Throughout a lot of the movie, scenes are filled with her running in real time with loud, bumping electronic music. Time is not slowed or sped up during these shots, pushing the audience through time with Lola, making them feel her stress at the same time and place as her. These intermediate scenes help ground the movie, keeping its sense of time consistent even with the other additions of time stretching and compression.