Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982) (Patreon)

There's no getting around the historical importance of Losing Ground, it being the second feature film directed by a Black woman. (See below.) Taken exactly as it is, Losing Ground is a flawed film, but one that is never uninteresting. Like so many debut filmmakers, Collins directs Losing Ground as if she will never have another chance to make a film, and this was almost correct. (After a second film, she turned her attention to theater.) At times, it plays like an intellectual curio shop, so filled with semi-formed ideas and partial gestures that it's no surprise that it doesn't all hang together.

Collins has a primary focus here, but it happens to be so conceptually massive -- action vs. contemplation, ethics vs. aesthetics -- that even the most seasoned director would be hard-pressed to fully articulate those themes in less than 90 minutes. So in part, she organizes these ideas around a sort of character study. Sara (the magnetic Seret Scott) is a philosophy professor at an impasse with her marriage, so she tries to figure out her artist husband  Victor (Bill Gunn) by researching various historical and theological accounts of ecstatic being. 

This is intended to raise a smile, underscoring Sara's basic straitlaced, methodical nature. But only in agreeing to move outside her comfort zone, playing the lead in a student's "Frankie and Johnnie" film, does she experience the existential freedom she seeks to understand. In certain respects, Losing Ground could be perceived as a crypto-sequel to Gunn's Ganja and Hess. Where that film fully embraced the Dionysian supernatural as a province for Black freedom, Collins' project approaches magic and ecstasy from a mostly Apollonian viewpoint. It's a gender split that seems counterintuitive until one considers the punishment traditionally meted out to harlots, witches, and fierce, uninhibited Black women in general.

There's a clumsiness that kind of defines Losing Ground without necessarily undermining it. The performances tend to be stiff and declamatory, without being so controlled as to suggest that it was a conscious strategy on Collins' part. Near the end of several scenes, the characters laugh so long and awkwardly that it reminded me of certain moments in Fassbinder films, where looks, touches, and laughs are held past the point of viewer comfort. The soundtrack oscillates between Muzak salsa and a 1970s studio-musician approximation of jazz. (Much more than porno, the music recalls PSA featurettes that were shown in schools.) And the camerawork tends toward the purely functional, except when d.p. Ronald K. Gray decides to be expressive, which is worse. (The ping-pongy homage to the Citizen Kane breakfast table sequence is especially sloppy.)

And yet, Losing Ground is brimming with funky gestures and bold, inchoate ideas. This is precisely the sort of debut film that should have kicked off a major directorial career. Then again, when you consider the relatively few films Bill Gunn had the chance to make, it's hardly surprising that the American cinema threw Collins away. The 1970s and 80s are filled with one-offs and stymied ambitions where women auteurs are concerned: Barbara Loden, Claudia Weill, Lizzie Borden, Bette Gordon, and so many others. Add misogynoir to the mix, and it's clear Collins hardly stood a chance.