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| | Kinoeye | German horror: Lommel's Tenderness of the Wolves |
 | | Haarmann's ubiquitous trench coat and fedora clearly reference Lang's child-murderer in M, much as his shaved head, pale countenance and insatiable desire to rip open the throats of his victims with his teeth call to mind Murnau's vampire. |
 | | Furthermore, Lommel's Haarmann is a liminal figure that confounds the notion of identity as something fixed or "natural." He is a body in continual flux, donning, throughout the film, the mantle of a police officer, a priest, an amateur butcher, a woman, a transvestite, a "model citizen" and a killer. |
 | | In the film's final moments, as the audience learns the fate of the historical Fritz Haarmann, Lommel's direction disallows for the illusion of narrative and ideological containment by frustrating conventional notions of narrative closure and thwarting, through the character of the fictional Haarmann, the reification of traditional cultural codes. |
| www.kinoeye.org /02/14/mcroy14.php (2358 words) |
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