Losing Ground
First screened and reviewed in April 2016
Director: Kathleen Collins. Cast: Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, Duane Jones, Gary Bolling, Billie Allen. Screenplay: Kathleen Collins. In Brief:
Visually striking, narratively shape-shifty, this film makes a singular, stylish case for itself and for a movement.
VOR:⑤
Buried for 30 years after Collins's death, the grim fates of film and maker shouldn't overshadow its vibrant audacity or belated landmark status.
Kathleen Collins’s mercurial dramedy Losing Ground further proves the ingenuity and stylistic diversity of the barely-distributed black independent cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s. The focal character, Sara (Seret Scott), is a philosophy professor on an urban campus, researching a book about ecstatic states. Her husband Victor (Ganja & Hess’s Bill Gunn), a painter, seeks inspiration in more bucolic spaces. Once they relocate, Sara seems to blossom while Victor appears to stray, but Collins quietly keeps whole decks of cards up her sleeve. Sara’s dilemmas are emotionally and psychologically rich, even as the film calls constant attention to its own constructedness through bright, Godardian colors, proscenium-style framing, and film-within-a-film conceits. Initially coalescing as yet another parable of an inhibited female professional who needs to relax, Losing Ground instead explores the heavy stakes of self-transformation, the ambivalent pleasures of the body, and the blessings and curses of partnership. Grade:B+
(I originally wrote this review for Film Comment.)
