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Clip description
The narrator (Clare Larman) remembers her father’s death and her mother’s resulting mental breakdown.
Curator’s notes
The child’s lack of complete understanding of her mother’s breakdown – her inability to deal with it – is conveyed by her imagining the mental hospital as a castle, her imprisoned mother as Rapunzel, then after her release, as a broken bird. The clown’s head, normally associated with carnivals and laughter, is mottled and aged and is juxtaposed with the narrator’s description of the ‘irony’ of her mother (a doctor) wrongly diagnosing her husband’s heart attack as a nightmare.
