In the film Run Lola Run the flow of the movie relies heavily on how quickly the shots move from one thing to another. The editing in the first ten minutes alone conveys to the audience that this film will revolve around rushing around, going fast, and as the title suggests, running. The fast moving editing techniques are well used to express the importance of time and how it matters. The opening scene is an array of memories about what just happened mixed with the current time frame of what is happening. The arrangement of these shots and the pace at which they evolve helps set the audience in a mood of urgency and gloom. The montage sequence links the story Manni is telling Lola, showing it as a single, continuous episode. Each cut falls perfectly into line with the dialogue as it is spoken allowing the audience further insight to the story line. The editing done is very precise and builds to a climax that really pulled me in. The tempo increases and increases, building a heightened sense of desperation. Then suddenly Lola screams and the action comes to a screeching halt. A quick cut to a turtle crawling across the floor emphasizes just how slowed down everything just became. The sounds put each cut on another level of amazement. At the 5:08 mark a heavy bass, techno genre song starts to play quietly. Between cuts you start hearing a slight noise like something is rushing by your ear. The continuity of each of their voices as they go from their location to the others, so Manni still sounds like he is in a phone booth, is flawless. At the 7:10 mark, when Manni realizes he left the bag on the train, the music gets loud. It replaces the dialogue entirely for a few moments but speaks volumes as to what is happening. As Manni ponders the places the bum could have taken his bag of money, the cuts speed through location shots around the world, the sounds is rapid-fire, and Ronnie’s face is mixed in almost subliminally at first before settling on it entirely. A quick look at his destiny for the screw up. I also watched the opening ten minutes of a 1995 film titled Nick of Time, starring Johnny Depp. Like the movie Run Lola Run, this film was centered on time being of the utmost importance. The editing does not center on telling a story initially, it uses cuts instead to show you how two separate parties may soon interact. The cuts are slow paced, mixed with a bit of action to give a sense of confusion. It is not a movie about speed like Run Lola Run. It is, however, as I said based on time being an essential role. The editing used to cut from the characters to a clock stresses that to the viewer. In the first ten minutes you don’t yet know why time is important but the cuts to the clock let the audience know something is amiss and dependent on it. I believe the editors made the choices they did in Run Lola Run to really make sure the audience was sucked into the importance of time being so crucial to the plot of the movie. Those choices convey perfectly how the movie will unravel. I don’t think any single scene in the film is more than a few minutes long without cutting to something else. The choice to edit this way made me never want to look away from the screen.

Work Cited
Nick of Time. Dir. John Badham. Perf. Johnny Depp and Christopher Walken. Paramount Pictures, 1995. DVD.

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