abstract:In psychoanalysis, the primal scene (German: Urszene) is the initial witnessing by a child of a sex act, usually between the parents, that traumatizes the psychosexual development of that child. The scene witnessed may also occur between animals, and be displaced onto humans.
Maddin pulls out all the stops in this elaborate pastiche of silent cinema, home movies, avant-gardish subjectivity, multimedia spectacle, and Grand Guignol hysteria to get at self-pitying childhood traumas that ultimately add up to a strict mother, a distracted father, the primalscene, and his first crush.