Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Run Lola Run
Run Lola Run
3. Narrative, interactivity and play - how does Run Lola Run reflect these concerns? How does this relate to Manovich's concept of transcoding?
Lola promises to obtain 100,000 marks for Manni in the twenty minutes she has. Manni would die otherwise. Clearly there is a narrative: a story, climax, and a timeline.Many times after a movie (especially one with a tragic ending), audiences moan at the stupidity of the protagonist and ask the question "What if?" In Run Lola Run, the director reads the minds of these audiences and plays out three possible endings to the situation at hand. In this way, there is some sort of engagement between the film and the audience, and interactivity in a way that the final ending turns out to happy one (The audience would have chosen that ending anyway, right?) This is a case of prodding audiences in the right direction to the obvious choice. They have a choice, but only one choice.
Other than that, I'm frankly not sure how interactive the film is.
The whole cinematography mimicked that of a computer game - the heart-thumping music, the multi-angled camera views, the still frames, and even Lola's fiery red mop (The characters you control in games are usually very visually striking). The film also explore 3 different realities, something only possible in the gaming world (You normally have three lives and would not make the same mistake over and over again). We also witness the importance of variables in interactive media, allowing users to push the boundaries within a set framework, and explore different options which would ultimately lead to different endings.
The film is a clear example of the butterfly effect, in which a tiny variation in the initial stage leads to an astronomical devastating change at the end. Hence, we see the cultural layer and computer layer fusing together in one that Manovich calls transcoding.
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