Joelle’s interview about the Master
The other had the camera bolted down inside a stroller or bassinet. I wore an incredible white floor-length gown of some sort of flowing material and leaned in over the camera in the crib and simply apologized.
Context
Joelle describes the scene she shot for the lethal Entertainment, and it is the family's whole maternal thesis staged as a single image: a woman in a white gown bent over a crib whose camera is the infant's eye, apologizing — "there were at least twenty minutes of permutations of 'I'm sorry.'" The lens itself was built to wobble like a newborn's vision, so what the film reproduces is being an infant looked down upon by an endlessly, unbearably apologizing mother. The mother-thesis the novel keeps circling — that maternal love is a form of guilt, that to be mothered is to be the object of an apology you can never absorb — gets its purest rendering here, aimed straight down the crib's-eye axis at the viewer placed in the position of the child. The most compelling thing ever filmed, by the family's own account, is a mother saying sorry to a baby forever.