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One of the first American features directed by a Black woman, Kathleen Collins’s 1982 film wasn’t released until 2015. In 2020, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
Cast: With Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, Duane Jones, Billie Allen
Two years after the film’s narrow debut, Collins spoke to a class of Howard University students about representation of the Black experience. She says, “If you’ve been the notion of sin incarnate and you’re now trying to correct that balance, what do you do? You make Black people into saints.” Of this extreme binary, she says, “Neither one is reality. Both are tracks to dehumanize you.” Losing Ground is a complete departure from the saints vs. sinners trope that Collins warns of. Instead, it focuses on that aforementioned emotional need and offers a study of complex individuals in the midst of respective existential crises.
According to Milestone, after Losing Ground’s initial 1982 premiere and 1983 follow-up, it appeared once on PBS’s American Playhouse and then faded into obscurity, not unlike Collins’ legacy. In 2015, when Losing Ground lived to see another day, screenings were met with stunned admiration. Critics found it hard to fathom how a film made three decades ago could still seem so fresh. The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody, perhaps the first person to review Losing Ground, described the film as “a nearly lost masterwork…Losing Ground plays like the record of a life revealed in real time.”
Watch a Masterclass given by Collins in 1984
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