Losing Ground

Wednesday, August 9 at 7:30 PM — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door

LOSING GROUND
Directed by Kathleen Collins • 1982 
Kathleen Collins tapped into intimate details of her own life to create this lush and unassuming story, shot on 16mm. Real-life playwright and director Seret Scott plays Sara, a treasured and no-fuss philosophy professor, alongside real-life playwright and director Bill Gunn (Ganja & Hess) as her husband Victor. Victor, a successful abstract painter, wants to spend the summer shifting his practice to realism out in the country, but Sara, preoccupied by existential questions about pleasure, wants to focus on her research in the city. Sara agrees to move to a summer home upstate if there is a library in the town, but quickly makes a commitment at the university that keeps her home for days on end. At a turning point in both their careers, the couple is left asking questions where their relationship is headed. Alone, Victor hires a model, Celia (Maritza Rivera), for the summer and flirts with her mercilessly. Wrapped up in a student film, Sara starts to explore another side of her desire with Duke (Duane Jones of Night of the Living Dead fame!). Kathleen Collins’s gorgeous and wandering portrayal of artistic careers and relationships in flux gives a unique glimpse of marriage and Black middle class life in the early ’80s. One of the first feature films to be directed by a Black American woman, Losing Ground was produced against all odds in 16mm, with Collins supervising a rotating student crew, the budget cobbled together from grants and West German state television (!) completion funds.  Aside from a handful of museum and college screenings, Collins’s work was largely unseen and undistributed until more than two decades after her death in 1988. Restored by the Yale Film Archive and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. (TV)
86 min • 35mm from Film Studies Center Chicago, permission Milestone

Preceded by: “Sade: Smooth Operator” (Julien Temple, 1984) – 4 min –  35mm