Kathleen Conwell Collins Prettyman was born in Jersey City in 1942, and died in New York in 1988 at the age of 46 from metastatic breast cancer. As one of the first Black female filmmakers to write and direct a narrative feature film, Collins achieved a great deal in a short space of time. Losing Ground (1982) was made against a political and cultural landscape designed to, at best, ignore, and, at worst, prevent Black women from attaining positions of power. In an interview with David Nicholson for Black Film Review, Collins spoke about the difficulties she faced when trying to make her own films: “Nobody would give any money to a black woman to direct a film. It was probably the most discouraging time of my life.” Once Collins did manage to make her own films she faced endless challenges from distributors who felt audiences wouldn’t be interested in the ‘niche’ content of her films. Ronald K. Gray, the cinematographer for Losing Ground (her first and only feature) explains this negative response thus: “Art houses wouldn’t take it because they didn’t know what audiences it would attract. Even in Europe, in Amiens [France] for example, the audience – at least some – didn’t respond positively because there was no ghetto in the film, no ‘poor suffering black folk’.”
Her own life also ran counter to these stereotypes. Collins taught as a professor in film history at City College in New York. She was also a French teacher, an established playwright, an editor and writer, a mother of three, and an independent filmmaker. She applied much of her own lived experience to her work, recording bouts of depression, failed marriages, impotence, interracial relationships, and creative turmoil. Her small but radical oeuvre, full of potential and insight, was tragically cut short by her illness, and as a result Collins never lived to see her work garner much traction. Losing Ground was restored and commercially released for the first time by Milestone Films in 2015, and a collection of her short stories, titled Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, was published by Granta last year. The revival of her corpus is largely due to her daughter, Nina Collins, without whom most of Collins’s work might still be unrecovered, facing near-disappearance.
Losing Ground explores the marital malaise of a middle-class Black couple from New York: Sara is an academic professor played by Seret Scott, and her husband Victor, played by Bill Gunn, an abstract painter. The film is comprised entirely of African American characters with a supporting cast of Puerto Rican characters. The portrayal of African American intellectuals and creatives is itself unusual and rarely seen. Collins depicts these characters without succumbing to caricature or bombast and as a result, provides an alternative narrative of nuance and inclusivity. Despite the absence of white characters, Losing Ground’s primary subject is not race. By circumventing race as a central narrative Collins subverts the expectation for a Black woman director to make a film primarily about race and, as such, the film resists classification. Collins’s collection of work moves through realms of melancholy, sexuality, and the shifting constructs of Black identity. Her peripatetic characters negotiate their identities from classrooms to bedrooms and through the spaces between, often questioning the importance of race, the possibility of self-definition, and transcultural freedom.
Challenging perceptions of racial identity and authenticity is now often filed under the heading of identity politics or ‘transculturality’. For Collins to be making art that scrutinised these issues in the seventies was extremely progressive. Her writing often feels strikingly contemporary. Now more than ever there is a demand from both artists and audiences for these alternative narratives to exist, and they are starting to emerge. ABC’s television series Black-ish (2014), for example, follows a middle-class African American family: the Johnsons. The show explores issues of race in America, challenging what Black familial experience looks like. The traditional paradigms through which Black characters have been able to express themselves have historically been rigid and narrow: both the maudlin slave narrative and a version of ghettoised poverty porn continue to dominate in mainstream television and film. Black-ish complicates these binaries, asking penetrating questions about cultural assimilation and identity, and poking fun at those looking to homogenise Black characters and their experiences. This seems timely and appropriate now, but Collins was too early: her work was deemed too recondite and niche for mainstream audiences.
In the central story of Losing Ground, Victor sells one of his paintings to a major gallery for the first time, and this inspires him to spend the summer in a village in upstate New York. Once there, he becomes infatuated by the landscape and the resident Puerto Rican women; one woman, named Celia, comes to the fore as both the subject of his art and the object of his affection. Sara, meanwhile, splits her time between the summer house and the city, where she continues her treatise on aesthetics and the pursuit of ecstasy. Feeling ignored and marginalised in her marriage, Sara agrees to act in a student film, a vaudevillian re-enactment of an old folk ballad, ‘Frankie and Johnny’. The ballad tells the story of a woman who kills her husband after discovering he is having an affair. It is in the metafictional narrative that Sara, playing the part of Frankie, is able to lose herself to herself in a moment of transcendence. The double narrative offers an alternative ending and identity for Sara, in which she can find freedom and passion through artistic expression and performance.
In a tribute to Kathleen Collins from 1989, American filmmaker and academic Michelle Parkerson confirmed that the phenomenon of African American women directing feature films still remained a rarity. Parkerson describes Collins as a mentor to the small but fertile community of Black women filmmakers: “She was among the first generation of Black female directors breaching the ‘inner sanctum’ of feature film production”. Revered by her contemporaries and students, Collins was a forerunner of alternative independent African American filmmaking, and Parkerson goes on to assert that “Losing Ground paved the way for dramatic work in cinema from the black female perspective”. Collins’s film is now considered the antecedent to Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), the first narrative feature directed by a Black woman to be commercially released to wider audiences. Unfortunately, the trajectory for Black women filmmakers has not risen steadily: the absence of representation and inclusivity within the film industry speaks volumes about female visibility. Women in film are under-represented both off- and on-screen, and Collins’s career evidences the two-fold tribulations faced when making art as a woman of colour: her film, difficult to make, has subsequently been forgotten.
It’s only in the last three years that any of Collins’s work has received the exposure and admiration that it deserves. Her recently published Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? conjures a multifaceted portrait of Black female interiority that has rarely before been seen. The stories depict a landscape of melancholy, interracial relationships and urban alienation (her stories, much like her films, are largely set in New York). The collection is cinematic in content and in form: many of the stories are located on film sets, or written in the style of a film script, and the language itself also has a movie-like quality. Collins described herself first and foremost as a writer, but also as a “literary filmmaker” looking to “find a filmic language of [her] own”, an objective that can be traced in both her writing and filmmaking. The literary language of Losing Ground is verbose and often stylised, layered with metaphor and symbolism and full of discursive fluidity. It could be argued that the meandering plot is secondary to the characterisation, which is what really drives the narrative. Collins often cited Eric Rohmer as “the only person who’s ever influenced me cinematically”, and parallels have been drawn between Losing Ground and Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s (Ma Nuit chez Maud, 1969).
The opening scene of Losing Ground shows Sara in a lecture theatre addressing a classroom full of students: her hair is pulled back, with her glasses covering most of her face. Sara’s physical composure is mirrored emotionally and creatively: “Order. That’s what Victor loves about me. No chaos anywhere.” This sentiment is later echoed and ironised in a lecture that Sara gives on existential aesthetics: “The natural order, if there is such a thing, has been violated. Chaos exists. As a physical and emotional fact”. Sara researches academic and philosophical viewpoints but feels the limitations of writing on the pursuit of ecstasy when she is unable to experience it for herself: “Nothing I do leads to ecstasy”. Her introspection is a marked contrast with her husband Victor’s extroverted, chauvinistic character. Victor is freely able to experience ecstasy: he exercises freedom of expression through painting and he acts without responsibility or consideration for those around him, specifically his wife, “You stay in a trance, you ever notice that? A kind of private ecstatic trance; it’s like living with a musician who sits around all day blowing his horn”. Feminist film critic and theorist Geeta Ramanathan discusses the authority of female desire in Desire and Female Subjectivity and suggests that “Losing Ground moves towards recording women’s desires with reference to the male articulation of desire, but not in connection with their fulfilment; the discourse of desire being cast in terms of the creative endeavours.” It is through Sara’s transition from the denial of chaos to the acceptance of chaos that she is able to find a creative expression for herself through performance. This reinforces the film’s surprising embrace of Black female creativity, its refusal to capitulate to the male gaze, the white gaze. Losing Ground presents an empowering image of a Black woman engaged in intellectual discussion in a position of power at an academic institution, achingly frustrated by her creative impotence.
In Losing Ground, Sara is almost invisible to Victor, nor does he take her academic pursuits seriously. “If I did something artistic, like write or act, would that get me a little more consideration?” Sara asks, considering how her professional endeavours are rendered invisible and eclipsed by Victor’s artistic pursuits. Gradually, Sara’s appearance becomes more vibrant and relaxed – the prim white blouse gives way to a delicate pink slip. By the film’s coda, Sara appears in direct contrast to the image of herself in the opening scene: she wears a luminous pink-purple leotard and skirt ensemble, her hair is dishevelled, and her makeup smeared across her face. She stands alone, pointing a gun toward the camera, on her new stage: the vast, abandoned, derelict car park. It is here that Sara explores the possibility of experiencing her own excruciating ecstasy and her sexual agency. In ancient Greek, ekstasis is to stand outside – in mythology it came to signify moments when a door into one’s soul opens up, fostering an intensity of feeling or an expanded state of being; to stand outside oneself. In her performance, Sara is able to play with her identity. The more she does this, the more she finds herself on “shaky ground”, as she confesses to her mother in the penultimate scene of the film. The metafictional narrative gradually merges with the central narrative, and the marital strife in Sara’s life is mirrored clearly in the film-within-a-film. The embedded narrative is displayed via the form of dance, without speech, accentuating the visual aesthetics of scenes. Painterly cinematography and lighting create euphoric dream-like visuals as Collins forges unique and sensory ways of replicating inner life.
The absence of speech in these scenes emphasises the rest of the film’s erudite and cerebral discourse. Losing Ground is knowingly self-aware; characters casually and flippantly tease one another about racial excuses and ethnic humour. Sara’s mother, Leila, is an actor appearing in a “thoroughly coloured play – we sing, we dance”. When Victor asks what her ideal role would be, she responds, “I’m not a snob really, I don’t long to do Macbeth. I would like to do a real sixty-year-old negro lady, who thinks more about men than God”. This is followed by Leila asking Sara to write a play about her life, to which Sara responds, laughing: “nobody would believe it’s about a real person, it’s too eccentric!” These candid, self-reflexive moments suggest that Collins knew the kind of categorical demands she would likely face from distributors and audiences alike. But, in spite of this, she stayed true to her ambitions. It is exactly this kind of gumption that makes Collins so inspiring: the breadth of vision that allowed her to see beyond normative binaries and to create the art that she wanted, one that replicated the reality of her own and others’ lived experience. Collins worked beyond the confines of gender and race, but she also knew the importance of pushing to create a level playing field. She was light years ahead of everyone else.
Lucie Elliott is a writer based in London, whose Master’s thesis focussed on ‘The New Black Aesthetic’, including the filmic work of Kathleen Collins.
Works Cited: Kenya Barris, Black-ish, ABC Studios: USA. 2014, Kathleen Collins, Losing Ground, 16mm. Piermont: New York. 1982, Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust, Kino International: USA. 1991, Phyllis Rauch Klotman, Screenplays of the African American Experience, Indiana University Press: Bloomington. 1991, David Nicholson, ‘A Conversation with Kathleen Collins Prettyman’, Black Film Review 5, No1, (Winter 1988.89), Michelle Parkerson, ‘Remembering Kathleen Collins’, Black Film Review 5, No.1, (Winter 1988/89), Geeta Ramanathan, Desire and Female Subjectivity : Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Film, Wallflower: London, 2006
