By Kristin M. Jones
Kathleen Collins, 'Losing Ground' (1982)
As Kathleen Collins’s witty and piercing drama Losing Ground (1982) begins, Sara Rogers (Seret Scott), a young philosophy professor, is concluding a class on Existentialism. Afterward a male student approaches to tell her he has read a book on Jean Genet she recommended. She enthusiastically praises its analysis of being an outsider, saying it ‘applies as much to race as it does to homosexuality.’ The conversation ends abruptly after he says, ‘You’re terrific, so alive and terrific,’ adding, ‘Your husband appreciates you?’ Later, after a similar incident, Sara wonders, ‘What is this thing they’ve all got about my having a husband?’
With humour and mystery, Losing Ground follows this magnetic young black intellectual as she faces daunting external and internal boundaries. Collins, who was a civil rights activist, playwright, fiction writer and professor as well as a film director, made Losing Ground at a time when black female characters like Sara weren’t found on movie screens. Although it came to be considered a landmark film, Losing Ground was given only one screening in New York City, at the Museum of Modern Art, and was never picked up for theatrical distribution. In 1988 Collins died of breast cancer at the age of 46.
Kathleen Collins, ‘Losing Ground’ (1982)
A masterpiece of independent cinema was thus nearly lost, but decades later Collins’s daughter, Nina, tracked down the original negatives for her mother’s films and created new digital masters. Losing Ground is now being given a theatrical release by Milestone Film. It premiered at the recent series ‘Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968–1986’ at New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center, where it is screening in an extended run through February 26.
Collins’s interest in cinema was first triggered by a course at the Sorbonne, Paris, on French literature and cinema while she was a graduate student. After returning to the U.S. she became a film editor, taught at City College in New York, and wrote plays and short stories. When her student Ronald K. Gray – who would be the cinematographer on both her films – encouraged her to direct films, she chose to base her first film on material from which she had some emotional distance, adapting the 50-minute short The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) from episodes in The Cruz Chronicle (1989), a novel about three young Puerto Rican men and their father’s ghost, by her friend Henry H. Roth.
With Losing Ground Collins was ready to direct from her own original material. Sara is researching ecstatic experience, but struggles to encounter it herself. Her husband, Victor (Bill Gunn), a painter who has filled their New York loft with lush abstractions, learns that a painting has just been acquired for a museum’s permanent collection. He decides that they should celebrate by summering upstate, in a verdant area with a largely Puerto Rican community. After being there, he says, ‘I feel lightheaded, like I’ve been walking around in a dream.’
Kathleen Collins, ‘Losing Ground’ (1982)
Filled with luminous cinematography and careful framing, Losing Ground often has a rapt quality. It takes on an even greater radiance after Sara and Victor move to their summer rental, but after a brief idyll cracks resurface in their relationship. Victor, who is increasingly interested in painting from life – he has always included narrative references in his under-paintings and itches to abandon the purity of abstraction – revels in the landscape and in a young local woman, Celia (Maritza Rivera). Sara finds the house beautiful but must order books from New York or drive back into the city, and Victor’s philandering is inseparable from his rapturous appreciation of the light and space. She determinedly follows a separate path: writing, visiting a psychic and a church, and encountering Duke (Duane Jones), an actor and former theology student, while working in the library.
When her student George (Gary Bolling) convinces her to play a jealous lover in his short film, which tells a story through dance, the stage is set for a profound shift in consciousness. The film-within-a-film, which George calls ‘an archetypal interpretation of the Frankie and Johnny myth’– it reimagines the story of a fatal love triangle that inspired an American popular song as well as films and plays – is shot on a windswept plaza, and Sara’s co-star is none other than Duke, whom she first glimpses from a distance, apparition-like in his cape and fedora. During a take in which the camera tracks beside them as they walk behind a scrim of greenery, Duke asks Sara about the purpose of the scene. ‘Something to do with the relationship between the characters, the space, the light,’ she says.
Kathleen Collins, ‘Losing Ground’ (1982)
Collins directed Losing Ground with clarity and grace, all of her cinematic choices helping to convey Sara’s internal journey. Collins admired Eric Rohmer’s films, especially his Ma nuit chez Maud (My night at Maud’s, 1969) and The Marquise of O (1976), and Losing Ground shares a similar sense of quiet revelation. ‘I’m trying to find a cinematic language with real literary merit,’ she remarked in a 1980 interview, ‘A style that doesn’t ignore what words mean, and may, in fact, end up being very wordy.’ The cast contributes a great deal to the power of Losing Ground. Many of these artists had or have had fascinating careers. Gunn, who died in 1989, wrote plays and novels and directed films including Ganja and Hess (1973), his groundbreaking horror story – which Spike Lee has just remade as Da Sweet Blood of Jesus– and Personal Problems (1980), from a script by Ishmael Reed. Jones, who died in 1988, starred in Ganja and Hess and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968); he was a professor and theatre director as well as an actor. Scott is a playwright and theatre director as well as a remarkable actor, and Billie Allen (who plays Sara’s mother, Leila) began her Broadway career dancing for Jerome Robbins and has had a rich career as an actor, activist and theatre director.
Scott’s performance is especially memorable in electrifying moments when we see Sara immersed in her research. During a sometimes hilariously frank conversation Sara has with Leila, an actress, about life with Victor and her yearning to lose control, Leila recalls how she used to enter a trance when she performed. Sara replies, ‘The only thing I’ve known like that is sometimes when I’m writing a paper, my mind suddenly takes this tremendous leap into a new interpretation of the material, and I know I’m right! I know I can prove it! My head just starts dancing like crazy.’ How many films can make that feeling so palpable?