Blog Prompt: 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. Take screen grabs to support your thoughts.
Run Lola Run is able to keep a strong momentum due to the impactful pacing of the movie where you get to see how Lola will go through it this time. Faster, slower, different, and better all weaving back and forth to create an interesting interplay between the familiar and the foreign events.
Every loop starts with a staircase scene but if Lola was in complete control and just learning from the loops, you’d think that she’d descend the staircase faster, but instead the boy sticks his leg out to trip her.
This set expectations for the 2nd loop early on by showing that even though Lola gets to go through things again, it wont be the same. Personally, I was hooked by the thought of these anomalies and payed extra attention to see what was different about this new “run”.
It served to even make the long shots at the beginning of each run fresh as they set the tone fantastically for the first time through, but in subsequent runs, what would there be to change in an interesting way. If Lola was truly the only character with agency than the only thing she could do is run faster, but the small changes around her like the woman with the stroller create differences small enough to keep the viewer from feeling like they’ve seen this before.