Film Screening: Losing Ground | SF

Submitted by the Event Organizer

The movie is a nearly lost masterwork. It’s the only feature that Collins—who died in 1988, at the age of forty-six—made. Had it screened widely in its time, it would have marked film history.

Collins, who had a master’s degree in French literature, was a film professor at City College of New York, and the movie is centered on the fault lines of her academic and artistic passions. It’s about a middle-class black couple, Sarah (Seret Scott), a young professor of philosophy who’s writing a treatise on aesthetics, and her husband, Victor (Bill Gunn), an older artist who has just sold a painting to a major museum. At his behest, they spend the summer in a village in upstate New York, where he’s fascinated by the landscape, the light, and the Puerto Rican women who live there—especially Celia (Maritza Rivera), who becomes the subject of his art and the object of his attention. Meanwhile, Sarah, whose own work is stifled in the rustic setting, returns to the city to act in a film student’s senior project, a dance-centered movie in which she’s paired with a suave and sympathetic middle-aged actor (Duane Jones).

Though Collins was a civil-rights activist in the early sixties, she never even glances at practical politics in “Losing Ground.” Rather, she traces the private scars of history in artists’ lives and work, and that subject opens the film, via Sarah’s classroom lecture on the wartime origins of French existentialism. The passionate romance of mismatched equals, Sarah’s intellectual confidence, and even her identity shudder under unresolved conflicts of race and gender. In Colins’s vision, the life of a black person—in particular, of a black woman—is a perilous existential adventure.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.