hayley barker
work 2003-2005

video clip from Rosemary's Glass Booth

video, 9;15 minutes, 2005
The scene is lifted from Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) and is set in a phone booth. The main character of this classic horror film & the video is Rosemary. Rosemary is frantically making calls to her doctor. A man stands outside the phone booth, his back to her. Utter terror fills Rosemary as she realizes that “they” are all “out to get her” and her baby. The tension between her desperate phone calls and the calm confidence of the stranger’s imposing silhouette sets the scene for 4 simultaneous, alternate endings to the scene in which only footage from the first 3 minutes is used. In Rosemary’s Glass Booth, there are four channels of video each showing the same introductory footage, then as Rosemary turns to see the man outside the booth, all four corners of the video take off in different directions. The video is a meditation on paranoia, the threat of potential violence, & the notion of trying to stay under control in a suffocating situation spinning out of control.