Auf schwankendem Boden

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.

Although I appreciate the significance of black cinema, I just couldn't get past the stiff, wooden acting. It was like they were just reading from the cue cards. She was not believable as a university professor. She mispronounced words and was a horrible, boring teacher. He was more believable as a painter. I ended up not caring about them or their marriage.

Okay I've read reviews and about Kathleen Collins, but some of her directions leave me wondering "What the Hell", like the sleazy way the male student looked at her after the lecture.

And especially with Duke and the cape when he interrupted her reading in the library, and which I found farfetched, forced and unrealistic.

Plus it's summer time and who in the Hell wears a cape, much less during the summer in a glaring bit of bullmarlarky. Oh and what was his reasoning for being in a library in the first place? Plot holes that a cement mixer couldn't fill.

I'm glad that Kathleen Collins was able to produce this movie and as an African American I will admit that it has it's flaws. But I can't rate it as a bad drama, but it is also not a good drama due to the scripting of this old fart and with a younger woman who wouldn't pay him noind if it wasn't written into this movie. It would have been more believable had she been more age and looks appropriate.

I'm not even going to finish watching this as it follows the same lame avenues of old white men and women too young to be bothered.

So it went from a 5-6 to a weak 3.

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.