Running on Screen (7): Run Lola Run and running as space-timecompression in Berlin

Some inspiration for anyone preparing for next month's Berlin Marathon:

'Not since the heyday of that infernal beeping roadrunner has a character spent as much time running across a cinema screen as Lola' (The Lolaness of the Long Distance Runner, Guardian, 1999)

'After walking, running is the first technology of the body that, through human agency, seeks to compress time and space...seeks to bring together in time two discrete points in space, overcoming the constraint on interaction caused by distance. I run to close the distance between myself and the train waiting to pull away from the platform; I run rather than walk from potential threats, hoping to place distance between the threats and myself.  Running as a means of time-space compression is breathtakingly illustrated in the stunning German movie Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run), written and directed by Tom Tykwer in 1998. In it, Lola has 20 minutes to reach her boyfriend or he will be killed. Given no other means of transport, she has to run as fast as she can given the time available to her. It is an example of space being (or attempted to be) devoured by time' (John Bale, Running Cultures: Racing in Time and Space, London: Routledge, 2004, p.1).

Franke Potente in Run Lola Run

'Run Lola Run depicts its setting, Berlin, as a cyberspace obstacle course or environment usually associated with interactive video and computer games. The eerie emptiness of the Berlin of Run Lola Run... is necessary to keep the protagonist Lola moving at high speed from the West to the East part of town and back again - another fantasy which is only possible when the city is recast as a virtual environment. In Run Lola Run Berlin is represented as an idealised space of bodily and psychic mobility where the instantaneous technology of cyberspace is physically realised as a utopia of speed...

While Run Lola Run does not explicitly indicate that the space of action is Berlin, viewers are clear of the setting: a repeated establishing shot of the Friedrichstrasse U-Bahn stop, a central commuting street near the Brandenburg Gate in the former East Berlin which has undergone extensive reconstruction since 1990, begins each episode of the film... Berlin is also made explicit as Tykwer often stages scenes at clearly-marked street intersections which identify particular locations or boroughs thoughout east and west Berlin. The viewer notes that Lola escapes her father's bank during one episode and faces Unter den Linden; several scenes unfold on the banks of the river Spree; Lola sprints between the Altes Museum and the Berlin Cathedral' (Claudia Mesch, Racing Berlin: The Games of Run Lola Run, M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3,2000).

Previously in this series:

Walford Half Marathon (Eastenders)

Race Strategy in The (US) Office
Top of the Lake and The Fall
The Running Man (1987)
Muybridge's Runner, 1887

The Casual Vacancy

Running in The Railway Children

The Railway Children - both  Edith Nesbit's 1906 novel  and the 1970 film adaption of it - feature a paperchase/hare and hounds race in the north of England. As mentioned here before such races, where a 'hare' runs ahead scattering a trail of paper and is chased by the 'hounds', were important in the early history of organised cross country running in the 19th century - hence many clubs retaining the name 'harriers' to this day.

In the story, the hare leads the hounds down a railway tunnel where one of them trips and is injured, narrowly escaping being hit by a train. But it all end's well, as the children look after him and in return the boy's grandfather helps secure the release of their father from prison. 

 '"Let me pass, please." It was the hare—a big-boned, loose-limbed boy, with dark hair lying flat on a very damp forehead. The bag of torn paper under his arm was fastened across one shoulder by a strap. The children stood back. The hare ran along the line, and the workmen leaned on their picks to watch him. He ran on steadily and disappeared into the mouth of the tunnel...

And now, following the track of the hare by the little white blots of scattered paper, came the hounds. There were thirty of them, and they all came down the steep, ladder-like steps by ones and twos and threes and sixes and sevens. Bobbie and Phyllis and Peter counted them as they passed. The foremost ones hesitated a moment at the foot of the ladder, then their eyes caught the gleam of scattered whiteness along the line and they turned towards the tunnel, and, by ones and twos and threes and sixes and sevens, disappeared in the dark mouth of it. The last one, in a red jersey, seemed to be extinguished by the darkness like a candle that is blown out' (E.Nesbit, The Railway Children - full text here).

The author (and socialist) E.Nesbit lived in various places in South East London from the 1870s until the First World War including Blackheath, Lewisham (Elswick Road), Lee, and Well Hall in Eltham. I wonder whether she ever saw Lewisham Hare and Hounds in action, the predecessors of today's Kent Athletic Club? They were formed in 1888 and certainly ran paperchases in the period when Nesbit was living in the area.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Burns Night Running Thoughts

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

Audrey Hepburn running, cycling and swimming

Audrey Hepburn would have been 85 today (she was born on 4 May 1929 and died on 20 January 1993). Judging by these photos of her running, cycling and swimming perhaps she could have been a triathlete if she hadn't made it as an actress- though perhaps a rather languid, unhurried triathlete!

(Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly  , Breakfast at Tiffany's -
these lines are actually spoken to her by the 'Fred' character, played by George Peppard)

Audrey Hepburn running with dog (guessing she didn't run too far in those shoes)

Audrey Hepburn running with deer

(more Audrey Hepburn cycling photos at Adventure Journal)

Hepburn in 'Two for the Road' (1967)

During the filming of 'Two for the Road'

[actually posted this on 4 May 2014, but as I'd started a draft earlier, Blogger published it as 3 January 2014]

Harry Dean Stanton running with Bob Dylan

Harry Dean Stanton

Good interview with Harry Dean Stanton by Sean O'Hagan in today's Observer, recalling that he and Bob Dylan used to go running together while filming with Sam Peckinpah:

'He [Stanton] later befriended Bob Dylan during the famously difficult shoot for Sam Peckinpah's elegiac western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid in 1973. "Dylan and I got to be very close. We recorded together one time. It was a Mexican song. He offered me a copy of the tape and I said no. Shot myself in the foot. It's never seen the light of day. I'd sure love to hear it."

... Kris Kristofferson, who played the lead in that film, recalls Peckinpah throwing a knife in anger at Stanton when the actor messed up a crucial scene by running through the shot. "As I recall, he pulled a gun on me, too. It was because me and Dylan fucked up the shot." On purpose? "No, we were jogging and we ran right across the background." The vision of Dylan and Stanton jogging together seems altogether too absurd, but I let it pass'.

Dylan in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) - not really dressed for a run

Running on Screen (2): The Running Man

Running Man (1987) is a film based on the Stephen King novel of the same name (actually written under the pen name Richard Bachman). The film, directed by Paul Michael Glaser, is set in the unimaginably distant science fiction future of 2017 - only a few more years to wait now to see if it comes true!

The plot is helpfully spelt out in the film's opening titles which tell us: 'By 2017 the world economy has collapsed, food, natural resources and oil are in short supply. A police state, divided into paramilitary zones, rules with an iron hand. Television is controlled by the state and a sadistic game show called "The Running Man" has become the most popular program in history. All art, music and communications are censored. No dissent is tolerated and yet a small resistance movement has managed to survive underground. When High-Tech Gladiators are not enough to suppress the people's yearning for freedom... more direct methods become necessary'.

In other words it's a similar plot to Rollerball (1975) and The Hunger Games (2012) - a future police state where the the masses are kept in line with a mixture of brutal repression and the spectacle of deadly televised games. In this instance, the premise of The Running Man show is that prisoners and other enemies of the state are let loose to run for their lives and hunted down.

Ben Richards (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) is an ex-cop jailed for refusing to open fire on civilians during a food riot. After a prison breakout he is head hunted by the TV programme's producers who think that his biceps will boost ratings.

Arnie and the other spandex clad runners have to run through the city chased by the murderous Stalkers aiming to catch and kill them on live TV. Arnie has other plans, outrunning and outfighting his pursuers before joining with the rebels to storm the TV studio. Oh and - spoiler alert - he gets the girl. To be honest there's more fighting than actual running - Arnie/Ben's not a running away kind of guy - but of course he manages to run faster than any pursuing vehicles can manage.

Strangely despite being set in the future, the music, computers, hair and dance routines are pure 1980s!