The German film Lola Rennt, (Tykwer, 1998) goes someway to challenging Laura Mulvey’s argument that female characters in films are “positioned for visual impact and erotic pleasure”. While it is true that there is significant visual impact due to the bright red hair of Lola, the colour itself is used several times to symbolise different things; red lighting to symbolise love, the red phone symbolises danger and the hair represents her speed as she runs through the city.
Lola also shows different conflicting emotions at various stages too. In each of the 3 runs, at one point she screams in a shrill fashion only to regain her composure and calmly carry on after the initial release, preserving a sense of balance.
Mulvey’s point regarding female characters being punished for resembling a threat is also contested, as in the first run she has arguably taken a masculine stance by assisting her boyfriend Manni in robbing a supermarket, only to be shot by a policeman outside.
However this seems to be due more to the theme of how little choices can have large ramifications (http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Run-Lola-Run/142094) as it is Manni who is killed in the second run. By the very end, we are left with a little cliff-hanger, as it is not revealed if Lola tells Manni about her success in a casino, which is now inconsequential to getting Manni out of trouble and instead leaves Lola in a position of power over him.
The 2000 Christopher Nolan film Memento, though told through a fractured narrative and having an independent feel to it cannot be considered as a Counter Cinema film. That said, it borrows elements from what is considered to be Counter Cinema, namely the narrative technique. This would seem to imply a certain pastiche element emerging more and more in Dominant Cinema and perhaps signals a blurring between the two ideologies, something not altogether too surprising in a post-modern environment, where certain gimmicks not usually seen in Dominant Cinema films are employed to garner attention to the product.
The narrative structure is used so that in each of the three acts of the film, the audience goes on a journey by knowing less than the main character, Leonard, at the start, to then knowing as much as Leonard in the second act, until ending up in a position where Leonard is placed at the start of the events about to unfold and we as the audience know where his journey goes. As the film goes back and forth to different parts in the story, it is a film that demands the audience retain their attention the whole way through. Perhaps knowing that this would prove a challenge to patrons, it can be argued that this is also a technique to make people require a second viewing and re-invest in the film, which seems to be a strategic marketing and consumer driven notion common with the Dominant Cinema process.
However there is an option with the Limited Edition DVD version to watch the film chronologically, which seems a bit of a compromise and arguably reduces the impact of the story.
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