Losing Ground

Losing Ground (1982) is one of the few independent films made in the 1980's by a Black woman director. Kathleen Collins was a brilliant, highly talented professor of film. Unfortunately, she directed only this one commercial film, and tragically, she died when she was just 46 years old.

The movie itself was largely ignored, and would have been truly lost except for a fortunate event. Collins' daughter found the negatives, and Milestone has remastered the film for theatrical release.

This movie starts slowly. The protagonist, Sara Rogers (Seret Scott) is giving a college lecture about Existentialism. (Director Collins had a graduate degree in French Literature, so we can assume the lecture content is accurate.) However, the scene is a real clunker. Nothing looks real or accurate or natural. I just sat there waiting for a student to ask, "Will this be on the exam?" Then a student asked, "Will this be on the exam?" My thought was, "Ninety minutes of this is going to be hard to take." Wrong. The film got much better quickly, and continued to get better as it progressed.

Seret Scott is an excellent actor. She is beautiful in an elegant, sophisticated way, and she looks like someone who could and would teach French philosophy or French literature.

We learn that she and her husband live in NYC, but they are going to live "Upstate" for the summer. (I believe "Upstate" was Nyack, in Rockland County. It's really a suburb of New York City.) Nyack is portrayed as "where the Puerto Ricans live," and the Puerto Rican population is a major plot element.

A triangle forms, and then a quadrangle. Sara has intimate conversations with her mother about her husband's infidelities, so we learn that they are nothing new. She, however, meets a very handsome actor.

This plot twist was surprising and interesting, because it involved making a movie within a movie. One of Sara's students is making a short film whose plot (and music) is the Frankie and Johnny story. The student is young, but he appears to know what he is doing, and the Frankie and Johnny movie, and the Losing Ground movie, start to coalesce.

The film contains some great dancing, some impressive art, good acting, and an interesting plot. I enjoyed it, and I think it's worth seeing. Yes--it will be useful to scholars of cinema as a historical reference. However, I'm not a scholar of cinema. I enjoyed Losing Ground on its own merits.

The film was shown at the Dryden Theatre in Rochester's George Eastman House. The Dryden Theatre is the ideal venue for any movie, including this one. It's not clear to me whether the movie will actually be shown in commercial theaters, or even at many film festivals. (The film was shown for a week at Lincoln Center.) However, Losing Ground will work well on DVD. If that's your option, take it. Losing Ground is worth seeking out.

Production quality isn't the best but the story and acting is great. It definitely feels like a passion project for the first time director.

I'm glad for the previous review on IMDb because like that user I started the first few minutes of the film and was not impressed. I decided to give Losing Ground a second shot and am glad I did.

Losing Ground is the only feature length film by director Kathleen Collins and only the 2nd feature length film to be directed by an African-American woman. Despite this the film never received significant attention during Collins' lifetime. It's a real shame because the movie is quite good. It's about a professor of logic (played by Seret Scott), named Sara who is married to a painter. Sara is regarded as beautiful but cold and clinical by everyone. And this rankles as she is married to a temperamental artist and has a free-spirited actress mother. Despite her professional success she is not really respected by her family, in particular her husband, who decides that they should take a country home for the summer so he can work despite the fact that it will make it nearly impossible for Sara access the library books she needs to complete her own work, a paper on ecstatic experiences. Throughout the film Sara tries to ignore her husbands flirtations and affairs which she chalks up to him needing as part of his own ecstatic experience, which she values for its freedom and artistry. But when she tries to let loose and pursue freedom for herself, conflict arises in her marriage.

The acting here is not always that great and neither is the audio. But when you lose yourself in the movie it has a lot to say about marriage, about logic vs creativity, men vs women, theory vs practice. There are also some beautifully framed shots that break my heart because they show how Collins was capable of true greatness if she had been able to create more.

Definitely worth giving a shot to this hidden gem, I hope more people watch and enjoy it.

A dramedy from 1982 by the late filmmaker Kathleen Collins. Spanning a summer where a professor has taken a sabbatical w/her artist husband. He, in turn, is inspired by the lovely women he comes across to sketch which irks his liberal minded frau who in turn agrees to star in one of her student's films where she meets a charismatic actor. Featuring a predominantly African American cast who are not playing pimps, gypsies or thieves, these well rounded people of the art world are an anomaly to what we as film fans have come to expect from these types of projects. Definitely a case of what could of been, this lumpy gem does has its faults (the acting by the lead actress is not very strong) but its sense of place & the people that inhabit it is fascinating. Look for Night of the Living Dead lead, Duane Jones, in probably one of his last performances as the actor who catches the instructor's eye.

It's an art film about abstraction and relationships in an upper-middle-class African American context during a summer in the early 1980s in New York City and a summer home in upstate New York. Sara Rogers (Seret Scott) is a 35ish philosophy professor at an unnamed university. She lives in her head with a highly rational demeanor. Her husband, Victor (Bill Gunn), is a successful artist who has just sold a major work to a museum; he is much more emotional and unpredictable. Sara's mother, Leila (Billie Allen), is a stage actor still practicing her trade.

Victor wants to celebrate the summer in upstate New York despite Sara's desire to continue working on a significant academic research project. They follow Victor's desire, and he begins to change his artistic vision, which includes a young Puerto Rican woman, Celia (Maritza Rivera). Meanwhile, a student in film studies talks Sara into participating in his thesis film project. There, Sara meets the student's uncle, Duke (Duane Jones), an older, experienced actor. These new relationships bring tension to Victor's and Sara's marriage and challenge their previous worldviews.

"Losing Ground" was an art festival movie that never made a commercial circuit, though it's now seen as significant, as Kathleen Collins was an early African American female director. Though the student film project provides some relief, the dialogue is very highbrow in both philosophy and art. Scott and Gunn seem somewhat stiff, but that may be a factor in the script that doesn't always sound natural. Relationships in trouble is not a new movie theme, but "Losing Ground" is an interesting riff with some neat jazz providing background.