Post modernism: Before you can understand this term you need to know about Modernism. In the first 15 years of the 20th century, the landmarks of this cultural movement include artists like Klimt, Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky and Surrealism. Modernism’s cutting edge has been the exploration of subjective experience and the clarification and simplification of structure. Some further definitions that relate to art, music, theology and architecture include:

·  genre of art and literature that makes a self-conscious break with previous genres

·  modernity: the quality of being current or of the present; "a shopping mall would instill a spirit of modernity into this village"

·  practices typical of contemporary life or thought
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

·  Modernism in music is characterized by a desire for or belief in progress and science, surrealism, anti-romanticism, political advocacy, general intellectualism, and/or a breaking with the past or common practice — Ezra Pound's modernist slogan, "Make it new," as applied to music. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism_(music)

·  Modernism refers to theological opinions expressed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but with influence reaching into the 21st century, which are characterized by a break with the past. Catholic modernists form an amorphous group. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism_(Roman_Catholicism)

·  Modern architecture is art with similar characteristics, primarily the simplification of form and creation of ornament from the structure and theme of the building. The first variants were conceived early in the 20th century.

·  In film the traditional model, the model that is most common in mainstream Hollywood texts demands narrative closure. Films conventionally, have a beginning, middle and end. Orientation, complication and resolution. There are alternate narratives for film text, which in the case of RLR offers no single way to tell the story, as there are three alternative narratives. The same story is told in contrasting ways and Tykwer is able to retell this same story numerous times and to make each rendering more compelling by making subtle changes.

Modernist Film
The distinguishing characteristic of the modernist film is a focus on intended ambiguity. Productions are meant to leave the audience with some sense of confusion and lack of realism or horizontal development. Most of these films were developed outside of the United States between the 1950s and 1960s by such producers as Bergman, Antonioni, Melville, and Godard.
Postmodernism:
The term came into popular currency in the 1970s. Postmodernism is characterised by irony, appropriation and self-reference. In particular, the movement has uncovered the presence of source ideas, information and influences. It has therefore challenged the idea of ‘originality’. It has also made artworks resistant to straightforward assumptions about the place of the author and the interpreter.
Themes such as disjointedness, self-referentialism (something that refers to self), the breaking down of distinctions between high and low culture(Kitsch, slapstick, camp, toilet humor, yellow journalism, reality television, escapist fiction, popular music (especially its abbreviation pop) and exploitation films are often cited examples of low culture.), and the embracement of pop culture are all generally agreed on as the major themes of postmodernism. It is upon further examination of these points that the film Run Lola Run can be seen as a postmodern piece of work. This film succeeds very well at visually exemplifying postmodernism.

Postmodern themes

This major movement in popular culture uses comic-book and computer-game characters as heroes and heroines of mainstream Hollywood movies, along with the creation of whole movies with computer software, and represents a trend toward virtual reality that fits into a number of the elements of postmodern culture. Notably, they reflect the following postmodern trends:

·  1. The coming of a hyperreal media culture where images precede reality, not copying anything in the real world. This can be seen where mediated images and narratives precede real things and events. This is especially true of films either using computer-generated graphics for special effects, like George Lucas's Star Wars Episodes I and II, or films made entirely of computer graphics, like Final Fantasy. These films create hyperreal worlds without real human actors or geographical locations, worlds dreamed up by art designers and computer programmers. Another example would be Avatar.

·  2. The breakdown of high art and its mixture with pop culture. Where once there was a fairly clear division between fine art, music and serious literature on the one side, and folk art, street ballads and pulp fiction on the other, in the postmodern age pictoral art and mass media like film and television often embrace other popular cultural forms wholeheartedly, abandoning links to their foundations in theatre and literature. The use of comic book characters in Hollywood blockbusters can be compared to Andy Warhol's use of pop cultural icons like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley in his paintings. We can also see video and comic book culture (including music videos) as a return to childhood, a rejection of depth for the nostalgia of youth.
·  3. An aesthetic where style triumphs over substance. The use of what could be argued to be superficial characters and stories from the comics and video games instead of from novels and plays, as was more common in the cinema from its birth to at least the 1970s, can be seen as such a triumph. Added to this is the use of spectacular special effects in films that deal with comic-book heroes and villains, in effect replacing the more detailed character development of classical literature and theatre.
·  4. The use of pastiche and recycling, especially recycling of characters and stories from one medium - comic books or video games - to another. Critics of postmodern culture might point to the use of such stories as an exhaustion of originality, a giving up on the modernist project of "making it new," to borrow a phrase from Ezra Pound. Film makers have run out of ideas for characters and stories, or are drawn deliberately to what some might see as "trash" culture for their narratives.
·  5. In a less significant way, the decline of meta-narratives. Postmodern popular culture doesn't retell the epic struggles for human rights, sexual or racial equality, religious freedom, or any of the other great historical meta-narratives, but lays these aside and either attacks all targets equally with its ironic barbs (witness The Simpsons), or just plays for play's sake.
With its time limit and "multiple lives" concept, the film owes a clear debt to Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski, who explored the theme in films such as Blind Chance, The Double Life of Véronique, and Three Colors: Red. Tykwer would go on to direct Heaven, which Kieślowski (who died in 1996) had planned as his next film.[1]
The film features two allusions to Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo. Like that film, it features recurring images of spirals, such as the 'Spirale' Cafe behind Manni's phone box and the spiral staircase down which Lola runs. In addition, the painting on the back wall of the casino of a woman's head seen from behind is based on a shot in Vertigo: Tykwer disliked the empty space on the wall behind the roulette table and commissioned production designer Alexander Manasse to paint a picture of Kim Novak as she appeared in Vertigo. Manasse could not remember what she looked like in the film and so decided to paint the famous shot of the back of her head. The painting took fifteen minutes to complete.[2]
There are also several references to German culture in the film. The most notable is the use of Hans Paetsch as a narrator. Paetsch is a famous voice of children's stories in Germany, recognized by millions. Many of the small parts are cameo roles by famous German actors (for example the bank teller). Also, two quotes by German football legend Sepp Herberger appear: "The ball is round, the game lasts 90 minutes, everything else is pure theory," and, "After the game is before the game."
On several occasions the theme of free will vs. determinism is integrated into the film. The opening narration states the futility of asking questions, as one leads to another and we only travel in circles. Lola's interactions with other people are similar in that a small conversation or interaction with the people on the streets lead to other interactions. For example, the man on the bike can become a happy, married man or a bum. The concept of free will is also presented because she has three different realities to choose from.
In his review of the film, Roger Ebert noted how the film's structure was very similar to that of a video game. Ebert mentioned the kinetic style of the film and commented that the "heroine is like the avatar in a video game -- Lara Croft made flesh."[3] The narrative itself evokes the typical video game. Just like a character in a video game, Lola dies once and sees Manni die once before figuring out how to "beat the level." The opening of the film sets the film up as a game, albeit a soccer game, however the point remains. Just like somebody who must replay a level in a video game and learn from their mistakes, Lola is given several more chances to successfully complete her mission.

Connections between the runs

Throughout the film, Lola bumps into people, talks to them, or simply passes them by, and the sound of a camera flash warming up can be heard. Their resulting futures are then conveyed in a series of still frames. The futures are widely divergent from encounter to encounter. In one scenario, a woman whom Lola accidentally bumps into remains poor and kidnaps an unattended baby after her child was taken away by social workers. In another scenario the woman wins the lottery and becomes rich. In the third scenario, the woman experiences a religious conversion. The sound of the camera flash warming up is repeated a final time at the end of the film, when Lola smiles at Manni's question about what's in her bag.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack of the film, by Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil, includes numerous musical quotations of the sustained string chords of The Unanswered Question, an early 20th-century chamber ensemble work by American composer Charles Ives. In the original work, the chords are meant to represent the "the Silences of the Druids—who Know, See and Hear Nothing."

Run Lola Run is a cinematic tour de force, with a very structured screenplay that shows that the director left nothing to chance (chance or fate is one of the main themes of the film by the way). There are no wasted shots in this 81-minute film. Its style is fast and kinetic, driven except in one short scene by a pounding techno soundtrack giving it a real energy, surging mercilessly forward toward two tentative and one final resolution. Commentators have linked its structure and style to films by Wim Wenders and Krzysztof Kieslowski, though it stands on its own two aesthetic legs, requiring no inter-textual cinematic propping up.

The two main characters are Lola, played by Franka Potente, and her boyfriend Manni, played by Moritz Bleibtreu. Even their real names are unintentional puns - Lola is indeed "potent" (from the Italian), while Manni tries to "stay true" to his woman.

The film is divided into three main segments divided by two red-filtered scenes of Lola and Manni in bed, fronted by a prologue that clearly defines the postmodern intentions of the film's author Tykwer. In each of the segments Lola has twenty minutes to find 100,000 marks to replace an equivalent amount of money that Manni has foolishly left sitting in a plastic bag in a subway car. He needs the money to pay off vicious gangsters he works for to avoid being "rubbed out" by them. The twenty-minute deadline is imposed by the promise Manni makes from a phone booth at the start of the film to rob a Bolle supermarket at gunpoint to get the money himself if Lola can't figure out how to raise it. In the first two segments, Lola and Manni fail catastrophically, causing one of them to die. But each time the dying character hits the reset button and plays the game again. Thus the film self-consciously echoes the structure of a video game - if Lara Croft or Aki Ross die, just hit "replay" to bring them back to life for another attempt to achieve their quest.

One obviously postmodern technique (given my definition of the elements of postmodern culture) is Tom Tykwer's mixing of conventional colour film, short black and white segments, and video tape filmed with a hand-held camera. This is an appeal to pastiche. The jarring contrast between the film and video tape segments highlights a shift in the emotional mood of the film: when Lola runs in present time, she's always on colour film; but when we see her father arguing with his illicit lover Jutta Hansen, it shifts to grainier, more subdued (at least in terms of colour) video tape. In fact, video tape is used whenever we see just the secondary characters, and neither Lola nor Manni are on screen. The short black-and-white segments always picture events remembered or recounted by Lola or Manni, the past pictured in the medium of the early cinema.