Losing Ground

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.

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.

Don't believe the hype. This film is awful. Poorly executed, boring and filled with clichés. Couldn't make it 1/2 way thru. Don't waste your time.

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.