Run Lola Run

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Run Lola Run is a film set in Berlin, Germany, where in the opening sequence we are introduced to a bird's-eye view of the entire setting; which is a view of Berlin's old city urban streets. The film was originally an art festival film, which allowed the auteur/director, Tom Tykwer, to experiment with several and generally risky and non-commercial camera angles and visual features to create the film's idiosyncratic emphasis on time, fate and human urgency. In doing so we are first shown a bird's-eye angle that merges into establishing shots that rapidly track to extreme close ups. Also in the first 5 mins of the film, we see the use of cross-cutting when Lola is having a conversation on the phone with Manni. This.This is interspersed with black and white flashbacks that are gradually sped up. Following up on this Tykwer employs jump cuts as Lola chooses to embark on her life or death 20 minute odyssey. Changing it up Tykwer follows this scene with a cartoon strip of Lola, which then cuts back to live action. The overall result of Tykwer, using many different visual techniques was to again create a sense of urgency, effectively placing the viewer along side Lola in her frantic twenty minute race against time through the the city streets of Berlin.

In the film a technique seen a lot throughout this film was, the use of flashbacks and flash forwards. This was efficiently supported by the use of black and white, to show that it is in a different time frame. While embarking on her situation, Lola finds herself literally running into other people, when this occurs Tykwer choose to use a flash forward into those few chosen's future, showing the audience in the first sequence what the future will hold for them, in a sped up scenario, in ...

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... success of a commercial film but having only created an art festival film. This fact leading him to having the advantage of throwing in every trick in the book and then the book, in other words it has allowed him to use a wide variety of visual techniques to help portray the roller-coaster ride that is ‘Run Lola Run’. An example is shown in the opening credits. where we are thrown a digital surprise, as a shot of a crowd turns into an aerial point of view leading to the crowed spelling out the name of the film. Another example is when Lola is running through the streets of Berlin and every time she stumbles into a bystander their futures are shown in an instant flash forward viewed in black and white. The message is that the smallest events can have enormous consequences, you know the saying a butterfly flaps its wings in Malaysia, causing a hurricane in Trinidad.

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