Run Lola Run - Relentless Passage of Time
In the film, ‘Run Lola Run’ directed by Tom Tyker, various verbal and visual techniques are used to give and display to the audience several strong ideas. Verbal techniques such as music, and visual techniques such as snapshots, cinematography and others, emphasized and helped to display the important themes and ideas to the audience in ‘Run Lola Run’. These ideas and themes included ‘The Relentless Passage of Time’, and ‘The Role of Fate and Chance’. These all centre around the main character Lola, as she has 20 minutes to raise $100,000 marks, save her boyfriend Manni from certain death and punishment, and for a supernatural reason has three chances to do so after she fails the first 2 times. ‘Run Lola Run’ is set in the 20th century in the city of Berlin, and is broken up into 3 separate parts of her chances to run and save Manni her boyfriend. The visual editing technique of snapshots is significant and unique to any other film, and used interestingly in ‘Run Lola Run’. The snapshot technique was used on occasions in which Lola encountered different strangers on her run to save Manni. The camera zoomed close up to these people faces before switching to snapshots which showed the major aspects in each person’s future. These snapshots were in a slightly dull colour scheme and had the sound of the old flash camera going off at the arrival of each image. The characters that Lola encountered that were affected by the snapshot technique were Doris the lady with the pram, and Mike the boy on the bike, and for each of the 3 runs the snapshots of their futures were different. This strongly emphasized the displayed theme of ‘The Role of Fate and Chance’ to the audience. For example, Doris’s (the lady with the pram) snapshots show for the 1st run that she becomes poor, has her baby taken away, and in the end steals someone else’s baby, for the 2nd run she wins lotto and becomes a millionaire, and for the last run she becomes a