Quick, name five film directors that are black women. Well, after seeing the glowing review for Losing Ground late last year in The New Yorker, I wanted to catch up with this independent 1982 ‘new black’ movie. It was originally shown at just a few festivals and special screenings, and then was set aside and forgotten for 34 years. The very personal film was made by Kathleen Collins, a multi-talent with experience as a playwright, film editor and college educator. Unlike ethnic films that lead with a social message, this one addresses ‘blackness’ as a wholly personal concern. These black American filmmakers are talented, but they’re also well educated, articulate and artistically focused. When Ms. Collins (in an interview) talks about taking up directing, she refers to film as a discipline.
Kathleen Collins passed away in 1988 after making only two films, both of which are present on Milestone’s 2-disc set. Losing Ground has surely leapt to first place in the line of American independent films most sought by black studies programs.
Kathleen Collins adapted Losing Ground from a play she had written years before. College philosophy professor Sara (Seret Scott) has the admiration and respect of her students, but a slightly less harmonious relationship with her artist husband Victor (Bill Gunn). He lives in a constant state of enlightened ‘joy,’ but is a trifle selfish and even condescending to his spouse. An academic at heart, Sara feels that she must do research to find some special happiness. When Victor sells a painting to a museum, he insists that they spend the summer in a small town upstate where he can paint the local Puerto Rican women that intrigue him. Sara goes along with this, but is not amused when he falls into a casually affectionate relationship with his new model Celia (Maritza Rivera). Sara is expected to be a good sport — they’re above petty jealousy, in theory — but she instead rebels. She takes up a cinema student’s offer to star in his dance film based on Frankie & Johnny. Her co-star is the handsome and equally cultured Duke (Duane Jones)… and he’s not a bad dancer, either.
Kathleen Collins was an avowed fan of Eric Rohmer, the French New Wave filmmaker known for movies about guilty men talking to women instead of bedding them. Her Losing Ground focuses on dialogue that flows and actors that can perform naturally. Collins attracted key acting talent from the theater and film. That some of the peripheral extra acting is a bit stiff means little — the playing is sincere, and the key material is excellent.
Sara’s relationship to Victor is expressed both in the dialogue and in the staging. He’s a charmer, but he is as self-absorbed as one might expect an artist to be. The big museum sale means a lot to Victor, and after uprooting Sara for the summer he’s full of talk about doing less representational work and breaking free from the influence of his mentor Carlos (Noberto Kerner). Sara likes the fact that Victor is ’embracing life,’ but not the attention he pays to his Puerto Rican model. Tall and dignified, Duke wears a cape and a hat into the library, yet is not a nut; he’s the uncle of the young director George (Gary Bolling) and openly admits he’s helping the kid out while he’s unemployed.
Sara finds herself expressing her feelings through the dance scenes, a film-within-a-film that allows director Collins to externalize things Sara would normally keep hidden. Young George is actually a good director: when he senses in the middle of a take that it is time for ‘Frankie and Johnny’ to kiss, Sara and Duke are feeling the exact same thing. We’re told that actor Duane Jones wasn’t a natural dancer, but the relaxed dance scenes fooled me.
As with the films of John Cassavetes, Collins’ lively dramatic scenes have the feeling of slightly improvised theater rehearsals. On the other hand, her dialogue seems fairly locked-in; as if the playwright Kathleen wants to see her lines followed. It’s still a taste of sophisticated film drama, with the added fillip that the people involved — black academics, intellectuals and artists — just aren’t normally depicted in films. Carlos is half black, half Latin … they laugh about ‘the mulatto issue.’ I will admit right not that I have no idea what the mulatto issue entails, which makes the interpersonal friction within this group all the more interesting. I’m also intrigued by the use of the Puerto Rican Latins. Other than Carlos, they seem like ‘primitive’ folks who love music and dancing, and that Victor and Sara are taking a vacation among the colorful natives. But there’s again no sense of condescension that I can see.
The movie’s best scenes are between Sara and her mother, played by actress Billie Allen. ‘Mom’ is a lively handful with a saucy personality; she likes to tease her daughter with ribald talk. We’re told that Ms. Collins split her own personality between Sara and the mother — Collins was a rigorous academic but also personally adventurous and assertive. Viewers looking to see an underrepresented aspect of black American life will be impressed by this woman — who came from a fairly prosperous background, went to Ivy League schools and sent her daughter to school overseas.
Sara talks to one student about American exclusionism, referring both to homosexuals and non-whites. After decades of black activist films (many of them good) that come out swinging, it’s refreshing to see a picture that acknowledges those issues, and then moves on to something else about blacks that general audiences can identify with.… such as being ordinary people with ordinary people problems. Ms. Collins gets an A+ for outlook. Wouldn’t it be fun to see Sidney Poitier walk through a movie like this, with nothing to prove and no dragons of bigotry to slay?
A little snooping reveals that Losing Ground pulls together a big chunk of black film culture that’s just now getting its due. As the first (it would seem) black female American film director, Kathleen Collins began as an editor. She worked at times with the impressive William Greaves, who made the challenging (to say the least) Symbiopsychotaxiplam movies, but has done just about everything, including acting in some prominent Black Theater Circuit movies in the late ’40s. He also has a pivotal role in a key early movie about race & bigotry, Louis de Rochemont’s Lost Boundaries.
Although the actors have busy stage backgrounds, Billie Allen also made a film for the Black Theater Circuit. Stage actress Seret Scott has a prominent role in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby. And although he didn’t list it first on his impressive resume, Duane Jones achieved immortality as the star of Night of the Living Dead.
Another multi-talent, Bill Gunn deserved the media attention given Melvin Van Peebles, as the writer and director of Ganja & Hess. His role is perhaps the most difficult to get right. Victor is an intensely creative and spontaneous artist. He’s certainly not abusive in his behavior toward Sara — but their marriage has some undefined boundaries, that he’s definitely capable of crossing. The show eventually expresses some of this conflict through the film-within-a-film, with admirable tact and judgment. The final scene distills Sara’s predicament in a few choice, well-acted images, ending on a shot of the actress too intense to just be called acting. Losing Ground has theatrical effects, but Ms. Collins has adapted them into cinematic terms.