controlling the film’s emphasis on a person, setting,
or object—with such a sense of joy that the movie
is more about the editing than about the narrative.
In the opening sequence, Lola (Franka Potente)
receives a phone call from her boyfriend, Manni
(Moritz Bleibtreu), who implores her to help him
return $100,000 to the criminal gang for which he
works. If he does not do so in 20 minutes, the gang
will kill him. Lola hangs up, imagines what her task
will involve, and then sets off, running through the
rooms of her apartment, down the stairs, and out
into the city streets.
Although the principal action is composed of
shots of Lola running, there are breaks in that
rhythm for scenes of other action that introduce
several of the characters relevant to Lola’s quest.
Tykwer uses a constantly moving camera, live and
animated footage, time-lapse cinematography, slow
motion and fast motion, different camera positions
and angles, hard cuts, dissolves, jump cuts, and
ellipses. Accents within the shots create their own
patterns: different camera angles and heights,
changes in the direction from which we see Lola’s
run on the screen (e.g., left to right, right to left,
toward us, away from us, or diagonal across the
frame). Underscoring the resulting visual rhythm
is an equally exciting sound track: basically, the
familiar disco beat scored for a synthesizer, piano,
and percussion, with accents of glass breaking and
camera shutters clicking, and Lola’s voice repeat-
ing, “I wish I was a... ,” and other voices chanting
“ H e y, h e y, h e y.”
Together, editing and sound create the steady
pace of Lola’s run, make us empathize with her
dilemma, and establish suspense (will Lola get the
money? will she save Manni?) that continues until
the last moment of the film. Editor Bonnefoy’s han-
dling of the complex rhythms in this scene not only
dazzles us with its pacing, but also maintains the
focus on what Lola is doing and why. The editing of
this movie—its rhythm in particular—has been
especially influential on such films as Paul Green-
grass’s The Bourne Supremacy (2004; editors:
Richard Pearson and Christopher Rouse).
The tempo of a movie can also be strictly meas-
ured in slow rather than fast terms, as it is in
another Tykwer work, Heaven (2002; editor:
Mathilde Bonnefoy), a moral fable-cum-thriller
based on a script by the great Polish director-
writer Krzysztof Kieslowski. Here the action—a
bomb going off in the wrong place, a woman admit-
ting responsibility for placing it, a police officer
falling in love with the woman because of her sense
of moral duty, the destruction of critical evidence
by a corrupt police captain, a jailbreak and flight
from the police—all takes place at a very deliberate
pace established by a piano and violin score that is
heard in virtually every shot in the movie. The
music and editing are not only measured in tempo
but are also devoid of accents, causing the viewer
to wonder when something is going to happen that
will break that tempo, signal a turning point, or
provide a climax. Then, in the final moment, in a
burst of gunfire, the two fugitives seize a helicopter
and rise slowly toward heaven until they are out of
sight—a moment of elation that contrasts with the
previously unwavering tempo established by the
rhythms of both the editing and the music.
Varying the duration and rhythm of shots guides
our eyes just as varying the rhythm in jazz guides
the almost involuntary tapping of our fingers or
feet as we listen to it. When the rhythms of the
visual and aural images match up, this is obvious,
but when the visual images move with a rhythm
that has little or nothing to do with the sound, we
intuitively recognize and react to that rhythm. In
the scene where the gulls attack a gas station atten-
dant in The Birds(1963; see page 276 in Chapter 6),
director Alfred Hitchcock and his editor, George
Tomasini, masterfully use the rhythm of editing to
build up excitement. If you attempt to tap the352 CHAPTER 8EDITING
Patterns in Battleship Potemkin(opposite) Soviet
filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein helped pioneer the
expressive use of patterns in movies using a dynamic form of
editing called montage. Eisenstein’s montage during the
“Odessa Steps” sequence of Battleship Potemkin(1925;
editors: Grigori Aleksandrov and Eisenstein) brings violence
to a climax in both what we see and how we see it. After
Cossacks fire [1] on a young mother [2], she collapses [3],
sending her baby’s carriage rolling [4]; an older woman
reacts [5] to the carriage’s flight down a series of steps [6],
and a student cries out [7] as the carriage hits bottom [8].
The pattern of movement from shot to shot accentuates the
devastating energy of the content of this scene.