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Clip description
Lisa (Alyson Best) is getting dressed after her weekly strip for Charles (Norman Kaye) when she notices a photograph of a woman on the wall and asks him who it is. He tells her it’s his mother. What follows is a memory from Charles’s youth – a miniature psychodrama in which, as a young man (James Stratford), he stumbles upon his naked mother (Hilary Kelly).
Curator’s notes
This is one of several sequences that run through the film representing Charles’s memories of significant moments when he was a boy. All are filmed in the home-movie format of Super 8, which clearly marks them out from the present-day scenes, their hazy look suggesting the fuzzy edges of memory.
The scenes give key insights into Charles’s psychological issues regarding sex and his parents (in other memory sequences the leading German auteur director Werner Herzog appears as Charles’s father). It’s hard to watch this particular sequence without the word ‘oedipal’ springing to mind.
