Synopsis

In Reckless Eyeballing, the title taken from a Jim Crow-era prohibition against Black men looking at White women, Harris imagines encounters between characters from American films such as Birth of a Nation (1915) and the blaxploitation film Foxy Brown (1974) to explore "the gaze" from a Black cinematic context. Throughout the film he juxtaposes images of activist and scholar Angela Davis, best known for her roles in the Communist Party USA and the Black Panther Party during the Civil Rights Movement, with those of Foxy Brown actress Pam Grier, mixing fantasy with reality and visually articulating how cinema's cultural image bank conflates Black American women's desirability with danger.