When we first see philosophy professor Sara (Seret Scott), she is lecturing to a classroom behind a lectern, glasses on and hair tied into a bun, discussing Jean-Paul Satre. This opening scene of Losing Ground (1982) might indicate that this will be a heady, intellectual film, but it’s really about peeling back the layers underneath Sara’s professorial image. In a later scene, we meet Sara’s mother, Leila (Billie Allen), who works as an actor in theatre and she talks about the type of roles she’d like to play, a “normal woman” of her age, not a stereotype.
Losing Ground was directed by Kathleen Collins, and was the first feature-length drama directed by an African-American woman since the 1920s. Being semi-autobiographical, there is a sense that Collins is keen to explore black characters not represented in American movies at that time, to represent intellectuals and artists, not just the domain of a European white director like Ingmar Bergman. The central drama is the marriage between Sara to an older painter Victor (Bill Gunn). He is celebrating the successful sale of an artwork. Deciding to rent a house for the Summer in upstate New York, the tensions unspoken between Sara and Victor come to the surface, particularly as Victor walks around, sketchbook in hand, interested in the Puerto Rican women who live around the area.
Eventually, Sara’s struggles to write an essay on ecstatic experiences are opened up beyond the page by a student’s offer to star in a thesis student film where she meets another actor, Duke (Duane Jones – from Night of the Living Dead). There’s a warmth and humour to Losing Ground, even as the main character struggles with a fraying relationship and overall frustrations with finding their inner life as someone new and uninhibited.
With its locations and the use of light in the cinematography, Losing Ground is quite a beautiful movie for what was a low budget production, particularly as we follow Sara’s wanderings; for example, there’s a scene where she talks to her mother in a phonebox and the sun setting hits her face in a sublime moment. The performances are great from Seret and Gunn, all building to a cathartic release for Sara’s frustrations of being overlooked and sidelined, with metatextual themes in the student film project. There’s a European New Wave sensibility comparable to the interest and tone of Losing Ground.
The film itself did not receive much of a release, and Collins died of cancer in 1988. Losing Ground’s restoration and eventual rediscovery is thanks to the filmmaker’s daughter, Nina Collins, in 2015; a true tragedy that Kathleen Collins’ film wasn’t given more attention in 1982, and that she could have made as many films as, say, Eric Rohmer.
Available to stream on Kanopy. Recommended.
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