part of the e-version of the book:
European Cinema : Face to Face with Hollywood
Contributor: Elsaesser, Thomas(Author)
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Date: 2005
Fore your reading convenience, I altered the paragraphing here:
Just as in Forrest Gump, the coordinates of historical chronology begin to bend, as the hero?s spectral body is present in every historical event, while his soul has time out, running across America or waiting on the bus-stop bench, so the runner’s film for the new century -- though dating from 1999 --opens up the time-loop across the metaphor of running. I am referring to Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run.
This time, it is a youngBerlin
The first time she arrives too late and Manni is killed by the police, the second time, she is killed trying to shield him, and the third time, she arrives in time, and Manni himself has found the money he had lost to a tramp.
It is like winning the jackpot in a computer game that re-sets itself after each bout, but here balanced by the agonized pillow-talk between Lola and Manni separating the segments: "Why do you love me? " "Why me?" Lola asks, to which Manni can only reply ?why not you?” Running becomes a modality of being-in-the-world, to counter such epistemological scepticism as besets Lola about never being able to know what goes on in “other minds”, however familiar their bodies may be.
The technosound of her pounding heartbeat ensures lift-off to another realm of possibility, shifting gears between the unique event and the “what if” of “the rippling consequences of chance”: Tykwer illustrates Run Lola Run how the smallest change in what a person does can alter the rest of their life (not to mention the lives of others, including complete strangers she passes on the street).?
Lending her athletic body to the sense that every act forecloses an alternative reality, and by that very possibility, makes it both preciously special and potentially meaningless, Lola’s running bends time’s arrow, to render obsolete that distinction between being “last” and being “first” in life, once one is aware of all the forking paths and all the roads not taken.
“I wish I were a beating heart that never comes to rest.”
Compared to Lola running, powered by an urgency due not just to Manni’s predicament, the usual city jogger to my mind resembles nothing more than a donkey on the water wheel with the eternal return of the same.
Running, too, as we have seen, may be without where-from and where-to, but its intensity to the point of in-direction, and its acceleration to the point of movement in multiple dimensions makes for that repetition and reversibility which ensures that the last can be the first, and the first will (not) be the last: the further the runner runs, the closer he or she is to the point we all have to start from, up against ourselves.
For the runner, distance and proximity fold inwards, suspending and even sublimating the very idea of “first” and “last” in an altogether different topography of being and becoming.
The Marathon Man is a Moebius man and as long as he is on the move, the actual and the virtual, the inner and the outer are the perfectly joined recto and verso of a figure, whose singularity is also a token of its infinity. Or as Emil Zatopek, the Czech Olympic champion ofHelsinki
(2003 )
Elsaesser, Thomas. European Cinema : Face to Face withHollywood
Amsterdam Amsterdam University
Contributor: Elsaesser, Thomas(Author)
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Date: 2005
Fore your reading convenience, I altered the paragraphing here:
Just as in Forrest Gump, the coordinates of historical chronology begin to bend, as the hero?s spectral body is present in every historical event, while his soul has time out, running across America or waiting on the bus-stop bench, so the runner’s film for the new century -- though dating from 1999 --opens up the time-loop across the metaphor of running. I am referring to Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run.
This time, it is a young
The first time she arrives too late and Manni is killed by the police, the second time, she is killed trying to shield him, and the third time, she arrives in time, and Manni himself has found the money he had lost to a tramp.
It is like winning the jackpot in a computer game that re-sets itself after each bout, but here balanced by the agonized pillow-talk between Lola and Manni separating the segments: "Why do you love me? " "Why me?" Lola asks, to which Manni can only reply ?why not you?” Running becomes a modality of being-in-the-world, to counter such epistemological scepticism as besets Lola about never being able to know what goes on in “other minds”, however familiar their bodies may be.
The technosound of her pounding heartbeat ensures lift-off to another realm of possibility, shifting gears between the unique event and the “what if” of “the rippling consequences of chance”: Tykwer illustrates Run Lola Run how the smallest change in what a person does can alter the rest of their life (not to mention the lives of others, including complete strangers she passes on the street).?
Lending her athletic body to the sense that every act forecloses an alternative reality, and by that very possibility, makes it both preciously special and potentially meaningless, Lola’s running bends time’s arrow, to render obsolete that distinction between being “last” and being “first” in life, once one is aware of all the forking paths and all the roads not taken.
“I wish I were a beating heart that never comes to rest.”
Compared to Lola running, powered by an urgency due not just to Manni’s predicament, the usual city jogger to my mind resembles nothing more than a donkey on the water wheel with the eternal return of the same.
Running, too, as we have seen, may be without where-from and where-to, but its intensity to the point of in-direction, and its acceleration to the point of movement in multiple dimensions makes for that repetition and reversibility which ensures that the last can be the first, and the first will (not) be the last: the further the runner runs, the closer he or she is to the point we all have to start from, up against ourselves.
For the runner, distance and proximity fold inwards, suspending and even sublimating the very idea of “first” and “last” in an altogether different topography of being and becoming.
The Marathon Man is a Moebius man and as long as he is on the move, the actual and the virtual, the inner and the outer are the perfectly joined recto and verso of a figure, whose singularity is also a token of its infinity. Or as Emil Zatopek, the Czech Olympic champion of
(2003 )
Elsaesser, Thomas. European Cinema : Face to Face with
No comments:
Post a Comment