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Essay / Run Lola Run - 787
Run Lola Run is a film set in Berlin, Germany, where in the opening sequence we are introduced to a birds-eye view of the entire setting; which is a view of the urban streets of the old town of Berlin. The film was originally an art festival film, which allowed the writer/director, Tom Tykwer, to experiment with several typically risky and non-commercial camera angles and visual features to create the idiosyncratic focus of the film about time, destiny and human emergency. In doing so, we are first shown a bird's eye view angle that fades into establishing shots that quickly transition into extremely close-up shots. Also in the first 5 minutes of the film we see the use of crosscuts when Lola has a conversation on the phone with Manni. This is interspersed with black and white flashbacks which gradually speed up. As an extension of this, Tykwer uses jumps as Lola chooses to embark on her 20 minute life or death odyssey. Tykwer follows this scene with a comic of Lola, who then returns to live action. The overall result of Tykwer, using many different visual techniques, was to once again create a sense of urgency, effectively placing the viewer alongside Lola in her frantic twenty-minute race against time through the city streets from Berlin. Throughout this film, the use of flashbacks and flash forwards was prominent. This was effectively supported by the use of black and white, to show that we are in a different time period. By throwing herself into her situation, Lola literally finds herself running into other people. When this happens, Tykwer chooses to use a flash forward into the future of these chosen few, showing the audience in the first sequence what the future holds for them, in accelerated fashion. screenplay, in ...... middle of paper ...... successful commercial film but only created an art festival film. This fact led him to have the advantage of including each trick in the book and then in the book, in other words, it allowed him to use a wide variety of visual techniques to help depict the trick roller coaster that is “Run Lola Run”. '. An example is shown in the opening credits. where we are presented with a digital surprise, as a shot of a crowd transforms into an overhead point of view leading to the crowd spelling out the name of the film. Another example is when Lola runs through the streets of Berlin and every time she passes a passerby, her future is shown in an instantaneous flash, seen in black and white. The message is that the smallest events can have huge consequences, you know the saying: a butterfly flaps its wings in Malaysia, causing a hurricane in Trinidad..