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Free Fallin': Tom Tykwer and the Aesthetics of Deceleration and Dislocation

2007; Routledge; Volume: 82; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3200/gerr.82.1.7-30

1930-6962

Lutz Koepnick,

African history and culture studies

Although Tom Tykwer is known for his highly kinetic style, in all of his films we encounter curious moments of both temporal and spatial standstill, moments in which cinematic time and motion are decelerated to such an extent that human bodies or symbolic objects seem to hover midair. Think of Marco's dive into the abyss at the end of Winter Sleepers (1997); the image of the red telephone flying through the air in Run, Lola, Run (1998); the sight of Sissi and Bodo jumping off the hospital's roof in The Princess and the Warrior (2000); and the final ascendance—an inverted fall—of Philippa and Filippo in Heaven (2002). Although Tykwer makes proficient use in all of these scenes of slow motion photography, what his camera captures are scenes in which objects and bodies themselves already seem to slow down, not by fleeing from their accelerated lives and unstable spatial surroundings, but by fleeing into them. Tykwer's moments of free fall are thus moments in which speed outspeeds itself and the intensification of velocity provides the grounds for discontinuous experiences of deceleration and respite. Tykwer's moments of standstill are symptomatic interventions foregrounding how recent processes of globalization reshape our experiences of time and space. Rather than merely reading these moments as expressions of a profound human need for extended structures of temporality, I contend that Tykwer's aesthetics of standstill serves the purpose of negotiating post-Cold War desires for new forms of localization amid rapid processes of spatial shrinkage and deterritorialization. Tykwer's repeated attempts to outspeed speed, so my argument, encode a basic desire for acts of territorialization. Whenever Tykwer's protagonists fall and seem to freeze in midair, we become witness to a cinematic vision, according to which people can construct multiple homes and temporalities within one and the same space. Whenever we see Tykwer's heroes fall, we see them trying to beat the global at its own game, so as to define spaces of their own—spaces whose very possibility depends on what they defy.