CONTOURS: Losing Ground (1982) / preceded by A Living Sculpture (2020)

Paradise Theatre, Sept. 19 2024

Long overlooked and inaccessible due to the lack of theatrical run upon its release, Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground is a seminal work of American independent cinema. Seret Scott plays Sara, an intellectually curious yet buttoned down philosophy professor, married to a self-doubting philandering artist, Victor (Bill Gunn). When Victor proposes a summer holiday in upstate New York, the sprawling estate contorts into a backdrop for their differing philosophical landscapes—scholarly order vs. artistic chaos—to come to a head, mapped, tongue in cheek, by Collins. 

Metatextual black film histories—including Duane Jones of Night of the Living Dead cast as an aging, out of work actor—bring the characters own racial anxieties sharply into focus, serving as a dual avenue of self-realization and eventual catharsis. Deeply in tune with the world of the sensual, through the excesses of academic and artistic processes, Losing Ground shows how each of its characters strive for revelatory, private ecstasies. 

Text by Iman Bundu.