On Slowness by Lutz Koepnick

Author:Lutz Koepnick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI001000, Philosophy/Aesthetics, ART015100, Art/History/Modern (late 19th Century to 1945)
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 5.3. Tom Tykwer, Winter Sleepers (1997). Screenshots.

Consider, second, the opening image of Run, Lola, Run, a slow-motion shot showing a grotesque pendulum as it swings from one side of the frame to the other and, in so doing, conjures and erases some of the film’s production credits (figure 5.4). The appearance of the pendulum is preceded by the sound of a clockwork whose precise ticking will create a stark contrast to the archaic swoosh that Tykwer uses to underscore the movement of the lever. After a few swings, the pendulum comes to a sudden standstill, as if arrested by forces whose power we are unable to comprehend. Techno beats set in while the camera first zooms in on the monstrous face depicted on the pendulum and then moves up along the bar that connects the lever to the clock’s main body. Set against a black background, this clock is no less menacing then the lever, not only because its face and hands are surrounded by mythological snakes and beasts but also because the camera first approaches the clock from an eerily low angle, subsequently hovers across its face, and finally tilts into a horizontal position and then approaches—and in fact vanishes into—the opening mouth of a gargoyle located above the clock’s hands. This extended shot is structured by dissimilar and competing temporalities: the clock’s rather old-fashioned Roman numbers stand in stark contrast to the accelerated pace of its hands; the camera’s floating and subjective movements counter the ravenous haste suggested by both the film’s soundtrack and the horrific beasts on display. Yet time here does not simply appear emancipated from the measures of everyday life and transformed into an autonomous and antagonistic menace. It also strikes us as being freed from the burdens of space and territorialization, the black background against which we see our clock defining a kind of black hole, a fold in the Euclidian organization of space, a dreamlike nonspace in which anything might be possible, but no compass exists to guide our way and indicate our position.

Tykwer’s films are replete with cinematic allusions and textual cross-references. They evoke the past of cinema, as if film history knew of no potential aging or forgetting. When seeing the opening shot of Run, Lola, Run, it is impossible not to be reminded of the abstract factory clocks as well as the image of Moloch in Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis. Unlike Lang, however, Tykwer asks us to witness, not the destruction of meaningful places and corporeal experience at the hands of fully industrialized time, but the birth of space out of the contingencies of the temporal. It is the camera’s movement into the gargoyle’s mouth and down the throat of time that leads to a gradual concretization of space and kicks off the film’s narrative. Time itself is thus presented as a monster: it consumes the viewer, but it also provides the grid—the monstrum—that structures the film’s events, relationships, and sites. Whereas the role of aerial shots such as

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