Christopher Harris: Reckless Eyeballing

Taking its name from the Jim Crow–era prohibition against black men looking at white women, Reckless Eyeballing is a formally driven study of sexual desire, racial identity, and film history. Employing hand processing and optical printing, Harris treats and edits found footage of actress Pam Grier, activist Angela Davis, and D. W. Griffith’s notoriously racist The Birth of a Nation so that his film’s cuts and loops highlight the social and cinematic structures of looking. (14 mins., 16mm film transferred to video).