Losing Ground Is the Pick of the Week

As I may have mentioned in my recent review for the 4K restoration of late director Kathleen Collins’ groundbreaking 1982 drama Losing Ground, every time I watch it, I always find something to love about and respect about it. I still find it a marvelous, intellectually stimulating film about the Black experience, and how African Americans view art, race, and sexuality.

The film centers around the intense marriage between buttoned-up college professor Sara (Seret Scott) and her more earthy, painter husband Victor (indie filmmaker Bill Gunn). They both have their own ideas about identity, literature, and art. Sara is doing research on ecstatic experience while Victor wants to find new inspiration for his work. So, they rent a summer house in upstate New York. Sara encounters and finds kinship with a charming actor (Duane Jones), the uncle of one of her students, as she gets a part in his thesis project while Victor becomes involved with his new muse, a spirited Puerto Rican woman (Maritza Rivera). As everything comes to a head, Sara finds herself on very shaky territory, as her already rocky relationship with Victor leads to tragedy.

Aided by exuberant cinematography by Ronald K. Gray, the film unfolds as a sort of battle-of-the-sexes between men and women and how they view the world and the art that comes into it. It all feels natural and lived in. It’s also a vital film that expresses the importance of Black cinema, and how we look at life, love, art, and intellect. It’s a truly remarkable work from a filmmaker who didn’t get a full chance to show what she could do with storytelling, but briefly, with Losing Ground, she did.

The 4K restoration of Milestone’s new 2-disc reissue looks fantastic, and the special features (albeit vintage) are still magnificent. They include audio commentary by professors LaMonda Horton-Stallings and Terri Francis; The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy, a new 2K restoration of Collins’ 1980 student film; interviews with Gray, Scott, and Collins’ daughter Nina Lorenz; 1984 masterclass with Collins, and much more!

If you love independent films, especially from essential Black artists, then Losing Ground is definitely for you.

Other releases:

A Woman of Paris (Criterion): Charlie Chaplin’s 1923 silent outing stars Edna Purviance as a kept woman who runs into her former fiancé and finds herself torn between her independence and love.