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 Yes--it will be useful to scholars of cinema as a historical reference.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.

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.

It's such a delight to see African-American characters through an African-American director's lens. There are no stereotypes, and this is a story that, while not devoid of racial commentary or subtext, could have been applied or adapted to people of any race. These are just normal, intelligent characters dealing with life, and more specifically, their marriage. The film has got a heavy indie or low-budget feel to it, suffers from below average production quality, and a slow pace especially early on, but it's worth sticking through. The character portraits director Kathleen Collins gives us are strong, and there is a lovely sense of quiet realism here.

The plot is fairly simple; a married couple move to the country, and the husband (Bill Gunn) begins carrying on with another woman. He's an artist, and his wife (Seret Scott) is a philosophy professor. She in turn starts getting involved with another man when she begins working in one of her student's amateur movies, and the making of this is a bit like a film within a film, with its parallel themes. The husband has no issue with applying a hippie mindset to openly spending time with the other woman and introducing her to his wife, but he gets a little rankled when it's the other way around.

Seret Scott is a joy to watch here, and I love how her character unfolds over the film. Ironically as her husband pursues artistic ecstasy or perhaps even sensual ecstasy, she's researching ancient texts and philosophical writings about spiritual ecstasy. She has this fantastic exchange in the library with a stranger (Duane Jones) she'll later meet again in the student movie:

Jones: What's the thesis of your paper? Scott: That the religious boundaries around ecstasy are too narrow. That if, as the Christians define it, ecstasy is an immediate apprehension of the divine, then the divine is energy. Amorphous energy. Artists, for example, have frequent ecstatic experiences. Jones: That's a lucid approach; it's definitely pre-Christian. Christianity has had a devastating effect on man as an intuitive creature, wouldn't you say? Scott: Who are you?

I just loved that exchange, and wish there had been more like them. As the film lays the groundwork for us in Scott, showing us her in the roles of teacher, researcher, wife, and daughter, we see that despite her success in life, she still bumps into boundaries. Most notably that's with her husband, who moves them despite her preference for the city, and then applies the double standard to getting involved with others. There is another moment revealed when she says "When I was little, mother used to say, oh, she's busy building her castles reaching up, up, up to some white private sky," and Collins accompanies it with a shot just on her during a toast, where her expression betrays pain mixed with wistfulness.

As Scott plays the 'other woman' in the student film, we get to see another side of her character, and I loved the scenes where she dances with Jones and then later kisses him warmly after a long walk. Because of the time Collins has invested in her to make us understand that she's intelligent, thoughtful, and caring, seeing her (quiet) passion in combination with these things is much more compelling.

If you're looking for an indie film that focuses on characters and is told from a very underrepresented part of society, this is definitely your film. I certainly liked it, but would have liked it more had it been a little more fleshed out or polished. It's a gem in the rough though, and it's unfortunate that Kathleen Collins didn't get a chance to make more.

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.

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.