Quiet As It’s Kept (2023) is a contemporary cinematic response to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s first novel, published in 1970. Set in Ohio in 1941, the book is an evocative illustration of the everyday particulars of colorism and its ravaging effects on the intramural. Themes of embodiment, psychoanalysis, and beauty are explored in both the source text and the answering film. Instinctual and eviscerating, the film encourages viewers to make meaning that is rooted in the subjective and examine their position within looking relations. The film is an intimate collage of vintage Hollywood, direct animation, original super 8 and 16mm film footage, and documentary conventions. Meditating on the gaze and Black women’s particular embodied realities, Gary also re-contextualizes contemporary social media footage. Creating conceptual links for each viral clip to a character, event, or thematic element from Morrison’s story, the film emphasizes questions around the book’s themes of internalized and externalized anti-blackness in contemporary culture.