University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Rediscovering the radical work of Kathleen Collins

(USC Thesis Other)

Rediscovering the radical work of Kathleen Collins

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

REDISCOVERING THE RADICAL WORK OF KATHLEEN COLLINS

by

Neyat Yohannes

___________________________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM)

August 2019

Copyright 2019 Neyat Yohannes

Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Abstract iii

Formal Book Proposal 4

On Losing Ground 10

References 22

Dedication

For Kathleen Collins

ii

Abstract

Kathleen Collins was born in 1942 and raised in Jersey City. She studied French at
Skidmore College in Upstate New York and French Literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. During
the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, Collins participated in activism with the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She eventually pursued a career as a writer,
filmmaker, and playwright. Her film, Losing Ground (1982) made her one of the very first Black
women filmmakers to write and direct an independent feature. In 1988, she died of breast
cancer at the young age of 46. She left behind several unproduced projects, including: plays,
treatments, and manuscripts. Her daughter Nina Collins unearthed many short stories, which
she published as a posthumous collection called Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
through Ecco Press in the Fall of 2016. In the Winter of 2019, Nina released Notes From a
Black Woman’s Diary through Ecco Press as well, which marked the second and (according to
her) final collection of her mother’s work. Before these collections were published and before
Losing Ground finally received proper distribution in 2015, Collins’s oeuvre had gone relatively
unseen. A long overdue influx of praise today suggests that she was a gifted pioneer in her
field, but simply got left out of the canon. This is the celebration of a woman, whose brilliant
work was lost in time.

iii

Formal Book Proposal
Rediscovering The Radical Work of Kathleen Collins

Describe your book project and indicate why it is unique and important.

Kathleen Collins was a Black filmmaker, playwright, and writer who died at 46 with only
one major feature film under her belt called Losing Ground (1982). She left behind several
completed plays, treatments, and manuscripts that remain unproduced and unpublished. I plan
to write about Kathleen Collins and discuss how creators like her have been eclipsed from the
standard canon. A few years ago, Collins’s daughter Nina unearthed a collection of short
stories and it was released as a book by Ecco in 2016. I reviewed an advanced copy in the
Chicago Review of Books. In February 2019, Nina released the second and final collection of
Collins’s stories. It is a compilation of selected diary entries and I was among those who
received a galley from Nina before its public release.
Other than this pair of collections and a few stray articles, there’s very little writing
available on Kathleen Collins. Even film history books and anthologies on female filmmakers
and Black filmmakers leave her out of their lists. Most aren’t aware that she actually influenced
and worked with more well-known directors like Julie Dash ( Daughters of the Dust ) and Bill
Gunn ( Ganja & Hess ). Her aesthetic interests, shooting style, and depictions of women of color
in the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s are only now beginning to permeate the general cinematic
landscape. Simply put, she is in that category of filmmakers who were ahead of their time.
Currently, there appears to be a growing market for stories about lost women
filmmakers. For example, there’s been recent buzz about Barbara Loden, whose career was
often overshadowed by her more famous director husband, Elia Kazan. The actress/director,
like Collins, died at 46 with only one major feature film under her belt: Wanda (1970). In 2017,
4
the film was selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of
Congress and has been screening in independent theaters and festivals as a result.
French writer and archivist Nathalie Léger even wrote Loden and her film a love letter in
the form of a genre-bending biography called Suite For Barbara Loden (2012). Whether it’s
Loden or Polly Platt, whose talent was also dramatically overshadowed by her director
husband (Peter Bogdanovich), there’s a sizeable demographic out there—women, film
historians, students—that is enamored by these emerging stories of women in film. I imagine a
book on Kathleen Collins could serve the same audience. It would also preserve a piece of
forgotten history that’s crucial to have access to when considering the timeline and trajectory
of female filmmakers.

Provide an idea of the scope, format, and arrangement of the publication.

The scope of this publication will need to cover a lot of ground because, as mentioned
before, there isn’t any substantial literature about Kathleen Collins in existence (at least
according to her daughter and the internet). An abundance of biographical details—written with
accuracy—will be of the utmost importance since there aren’t other primary texts on Collins
available to reference. After covering the bases, I’d like to also branch off into chapters on her
little-known artistic collaborations and friendships, her long stretch of activism and work with
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960’s with Peggy Dammond
Preacely (including some of their gripping correspondence on the matter), an overview of her
unseen works with historical context (and some of the correspondence related to their
production, or lack thereof), an analysis of her distinct style, and finally, a close look at her final
days and legacy.
5
For the format, I’d like to take a page from Léger’s book on Loden and lead with Losing
Ground. Léger effectively anchors her biography with the story of Wanda as a through-line.
Losing Ground is Collins’ most accessible work and it might be the best tool in my arsenal for
hooking readers early on. And because it not-so-loosely takes from Collins’ own life, it lends to
natural transitions or segues into other topics along the way. While this technique might work
better without a traditional arrangement, for the sake of early stages organization, I have
divided the book into chapters that cover the topics mentioned in my scope description.

Who are the primary audiences for your publication? Indicate who, why and how the
publication will appeal to them. List these groups in order of importance.

The primary audiences for my publication are as follows: film lovers, Black women (and
women in general), historians (particularly in the areas of film, feminism, and Black history),
students/professors (those in an academic setting), and the general curious reader. At first
glance, this book would best serve the niche market of obscure film lovers. However, with
proper marketing strategies, it could appeal to wider audiences. Black women might be eager
to learn of a filmmaker they can more readily relate to and women in general could appreciate
Collins’ early feminist work. Moreover, because this is a revelatory piece of history, professors
and educators might potentially weave this into their curriculum on film, literature (in reference
to her short stories), or even Black history.

List your credentials and experience. What makes you uniquely qualified to write this
book?

For the last two years, I’ve done extensive research on my chosen subject (Kathleen
Collins). I’ve done web-based research, in-person interviews with knowledgeable sources, and
recently accessed my subject’s unprocessed papers at the Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture. I’ve gained familiarity with the subject’s released works—including her
6
aforementioned short story collection and her films, Losing Ground and The Cruz Brothers and
Miss Malloy (1980).
As of late, I have a working relationship with Nina Collins (who’s responsible for
donating the Kathleen Collins Papers to the Schomburg) as well as with the founders of
Milestone Films (Dennis Doros and Amy Heller), who digitally restored and continue to
distribute Losing Ground after Nina Collins found the original negative in 2013. Also, my
background in creative writing, arts journalism, and visual studies might prove to be helpful in
the process of developing this project.

List the primary competition for your book and indicate your advantage over them.
Photocopy title pages from 1 or 2 of them and append them to your proposal.

The primary competition for my book are as follows: Alicia Malone’s The Female Gaze:
Essential Movies Made By Women (November 2018) and Christina Baker’s Contemporary Black
Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance (October 2018). These collections were both
published within the last two months and make for rather timely points of reference. Malone’s
book reads like an anthology and each chapter is devoted to a film made by a woman (select
chapters include other writers on how these films have impacted their lives). Baker’s book is
less of an anthology and more so a meditation on a few familiar Black women filmmakers and
how they’ve affected the canon (and each other’s work). I suspect that there would certainly be
demographic crossover between those interested in these two books and those who might be
interested in my potential text. That said, what would set mine apart is that as comprehensive
as they are, neither Malone’s or Baker’s book mentions Kathleen Collins. This advantage could
make my book a viable contender.

What particular details would you like to see emphasized in the advertising or promotion
of your work? (special features, new interpretations, artwork, illustrations, indexing, etc.)

7
Richard Brody, a writer at The New Yorker , was perhaps the first person to review
Losing Ground . Of it he said, “A nearly lost masterwork... Losing Ground plays like the record of
a life revealed in real time.” I figure that quote or another from his review might be nice to
include in promoting my work. It’s a solid co-sign of sorts. I also think it would be worth
mentioning in advertisements that Collins is a pioneer Black woman filmmaker left out of the
canon, that Losing Ground is one of the first feature-length films by a Black woman, that
Collins challenged stereotypes and introduced images of women of color rarely seen in popular
culture, and finally, that never-before-seen works have been unearthed. Also, I would love to
include photos from Collins’s papers as well as some of her early abstract illustrations that I
stumbled across in her diaries.

What cinema or other journals would be most likely to use your book as either assigned
reading or a textbook?

Three film journals come to mind. Immediately, I think of Another Gaze: Feminist Film
Journal , Cléo Film Journal , and Film Comment . The first two journals/sites focus specifically on
little-known films by women and the third covers both the obscure and the mainstream.
Another Gaze and Film Comment also publish print editions, whilst maintaining active
websites. From a literary perspective, it seems Emily Books and Passerbuys would each be a
perfect match for my book. Both of these sites have cultivated a particular aesthetic that caters
to women who love rare films and little-known independent books. They both have
recommended the aforementioned Suite for Barbara Loden in the past, along with books about
other women not unlike Kathleen Collins. This could make for a marketing partnership with
sites that understand my target demographic and have already garnered a loyal following.
Emily Books is also a book publisher of women’s writing and it’s one I’m seriously considering
as I write this proposal. I trust their judgement and there would be a built-in audience.
8

Include the Table of Contents with a brief summary of each chapter in order to provide
the map of what the book will contain.

-Acknowledgements

Self-explanatory (Because so many people have had a heavy hand in my research for
this project, I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank them)

-Preface

Here, I plan to offer a short section on how I came across Kathleen Collins and why she
personally means so much to me.

-Introduction

This section will be a brief overview of the ground I plan to cover. Because many
readers will probably have very little working knowledge of Kathleen Collins, the
introduction will offer a small taste of what’s to come.

-Chapters (these will undoubtedly be retitled as they’re written and better understood)
● On Losing Ground
● On Cruz Brothers and Other Works
● On Her Writing Style
● On Her Notable Artistic Collaborations
● On Her Activism
● On Her Final Days and Lasting Legacy

-Photos of/Illustrations by Collins

Collins’ boxes at the Schomburg include a number of photos and illustrations that I
would love to include at the end of the book as a mini captioned album.

-Bibliography/Citations List

This one is self-explanatory, but I plan to credit all of my sources.

9
DRAFT 3

ON LOSING GROUND

Losing Ground was first screened in the summer of 1982 at Irvington, New York’s Town
Hall Theater. It was a quiet local premiere. In 1983, the film received another public showing on
a lowkey Monday night in the dead of January. It was selected as part of the Museum of
Modern Art’s Cineprobe series. The New York Times published three sentences of coverage on
the event. And then, somehow, one of the very first fictional features by a Black woman was
lost in space and time. When Kathleen Collins died of breast cancer in 1988, she left behind a
trail of unfinished magic. Losing Ground is what her finished magic looks like.
Wearing a smart blazer and a pair of oversized frames that cover the majority of her
delicate face, Sara Rogers commands a room of college students as she rationalizes the works
of Camus, Sartre, and Nietzsche. She makes bold statements like, “natural order has been
violated,” and “human existence must be without rhyme, without reason” as her class looks on
in rapture. The lecturer, Sara, is played by Seret Scott, who was a noted stage actress at the
time. She ventured into film work to play the leading lady in Losing Ground , with her dear friend
Kathy at the helm.
In her early notes, Collins first describes Sara as “a stunning woman.” She refers to
“Creole features and color...live eyes, playful yet intense energy.” Scott undeniably fits the bill.
In the opening scene, Scott plays a convincing professor to “row after row of black male
students, all wearing glasses, all looking exceptionally scholarly,” as outlined by Collins in the
margins of her director’s script. Sara’s students are enamored by her. One walks up to her
podium at the end of class. “I got hold of the book on Genet,” he says with eager eyes. His
10
body language suggests he’s been at the edge of his seat all class, just waiting to share a
moment with his professor. And she not only obliges, but matches his enthusiasm.
“Good,” she says, “It’s the finest analysis of being an outsider I’ve ever read...there are
books that can make a difference on a life.” Entranced, the student says, “You’re so full of life!”
And though he means it, the student stammers to move past this moment that teeters on the
brink of suggestive. Sara doesn’t mind. In fact, she seems to enjoy innocent exchanges like
this one. We learn right away that Sara is generous with her students. Despite her pensive
demeanor, the moment one of Sara’s students approaches her for conversation—or even later,
asks her to be in his film—she responds with an openness marked by the instant relaxation of
her tense, dissertation-laden shoulders.
Kathleen Collins felt a similar responsibility to her students. She said so in a live
interview at the time of Losing Ground’s release. “The commitment to teaching, for some
reason, has remained with me in spite of, I suppose, my heart being very much committed to
making films,” she says, “but the teaching is still very much a part of it.” This particular
interview is special because it details Collins’s relationship to teaching and filmmaking, but
more so because it’s one of the rare bits of publicly available footage she left behind when she
died at the early age of 46. This conversation is part of a series of seminars Collins led at
Indiana University (IU) in the early 1980s, upon the invitation of film theorist, archivist, and
professor Phyllis R. Klotman. The two women were often in conversation, but what’s notable
about Klotman is that she founded IU’s Black Film Center/Archive, which was an early
preserver of significant research and archival material related to Collins, including the 16mm
print of Losing Ground . Collins tells Klotman that while teaching film classes on aesthetics
came second-nature to her, it was the production classes that gave her pause. She had to
11
figure out a way to teach film using the techniques with which language is taught. And so she
did.
In order to help her students develop a film vocabulary, Collins went back to basics.
Beginning with the early mechanics of silent film, she worked her way up to more modern
works. One of the best examples is her lesson on Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robbery
(1903), which is often credited as one of the earliest known narrative films. In 14 scenes that
add up to just about 11 minutes, The Great Train Robbery follows a group of bandits who have
staged a gutsy train hold-up. Collins uses the film to discuss the inherent connection between
language and technology. She explains this notion to Klotman in the way she might describe it
to her students—some of whom are in the audience during this live taping at IU:
What happens in that movie is, in the beginning, he does a usual stationary camera; the
actors become overly dramatic because there’s a distance between them and the
camera. The camera isn’t moving and it’s silent, therefore, their gestures have to be
bigger than life. Then at one point, there’s this funny little moment when the “bad guys”
are running away down the hill and the camera—you almost feel like it’s an instinct—it
starts to pan with them. It starts to move with them and suddenly, your involvement
changes. Your involvement changes from just simply being an objective observer to
someone saying oh look at those guys going down the hill . And that’s a technological
advance. In other words, they had to find a pivot on which the camera could swing, in
order to be able to get it to move. And you can go on from there indefinitely. They had
to develop a wheel of some kind, on which you could place the camera in order for it to
begin to dolly. They had to invent a zoom lens in order for [the camera] to be able to
move in and out. But each one of those technological advances was actually dictated
by some emotional need.
Emotional need is also what seems to invariably motivate all of Collins’ projects. Losing
Ground, in particular, displays her preoccupation with aesthetics, which draws from an implied
desire to humanize her characters—nearly all of whom are Black or Brown.
12
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.” This is likely the same sentiment that inspired the ambiguous quality of
Losing Ground. The film 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.
Sara and her husband Victor (played by the prolific actor, playwright, and director Bill
Gunn) portray a Black marriage that was and continues to be a rare tableau. Sara is
self-serious and studious. She’s consumed by her research for a dissertation on ecstatic
experience —a state of euphoria she has, perhaps, never known. Victor is a mercurial abstract
painter, who becomes hell-bent on trying his hand at more figurative work. So much so that
after he sells one of his floor-length abstract paintings to a major museum’s permanent
collection, he suggests that the pair spend the summer at a country house in upstate New
York, where “all those Puerto Rican ladies live in those old Victorian houses.” Sara is
unamused by Victor’s flight of fancy, but nevertheless, acquiesces to a summer away.
Victor finds a young Puerto Rican muse named Celia (Maritza Rivera) to paint as he
moves away from abstraction. The two of them together tests Sara’s patience. She worries
she’s too uptight and seems to crave the artistic temperament that her husband and Celia
have, but she characteristically lacks. So when a creative opportunity arises, Sara flings herself
into the project without hesitation. George (Gary Bolling), a former student of Sara’s, has
recruited her to be in his Senior thesis film. He also recruits his uncle Duke (played by Duane
Jones, best known for his role as Ben in Night of the Living Dead , 1968).
13
Prior to shooting the student film, Sara meets Duke in a library during one of her
exhaustive research visits. He wears a majestic cape and looks altogether anachronistic. He
tells Sara of his past lives and explains that this is the first iteration in which he is Black. “I must
have built up a lot of karmic debt,” he jokes. This summons one of Sara’s unruly, coquettish
laughs. It’s jarring to witness how quick wit can undo her serious demeanor in one foul swoop.
But this isn’t an isolated incident. Sara’s giggle creeps up whenever she experiences flattery
from her students or exchanges one-liners with her husband too. It’s a reminder that she does,
perhaps, have a chance at ecstasy trapped somewhere deep beneath her overwhelming
glasses and coiled nature.
This intellectual quest in search of an ecstatic experience would require Sara to get out
from behind her books and open herself up to something new. Something exciting. And it’s a
task that proves less difficult than expected when she grows weary of her philandering
husband’s thinly-veiled attempts at passing Celia off as a mere subject for his figure painting.
She can see that the pair has a palpable chemistry—though mostly propelled by lust—and a
matched fervor that bounces off the stone walls of the summer country home. Sara isn’t
bothered by the flagrant cheating as she is by her inherent lack of an artist’s zest for life. In an
exasperating moment, she asks Victor, “If I did something artistic like write or act, would that
get me a little more consideration?” Sly as ever, he responds, “If you were any good.” This is a
setback that Sara refuses to take sitting down.
During the final act of the film, in a scene that takes place on the top floor of the
summer home one night, Victor is drunk and engaged in sloppy dancing with Celia. Sara is
there too. And Duke, who she’s brought along to show Victor that she could be brash too.
When Celia has had enough of wino Victor, he steals his wife from Duke. Moments later, he
14
tosses Sara aside and says, “I always forget you can’t dance.” But Victor is sorely mistaken.
He hasn’t seen what the rest of us have. Which is that Sara is a natural dancer.
George first eyed her through his looking glass and found the perfect shot. “I got you in
a close-up,” he says, “you look just like Dorothy Dandridge Bright Road , MGM 1953.” Whether
it was blind luck, instinct, or just the lens of puppy love, George saw Sara exactly how she
wanted to be seen. Between her artist husband and actress mother, she was always the
reliable one who balanced the eccentricity in the room. Little did they know that she’d longed
for a bit of limelight herself.
With Duke as her screen partner, Sara shim shams and boogies at dusk in silent
Vaudeville numbers under George’s spirited direction. In each sequence, she’s dressed in
bright, skin-tight leotards paired with a slinky wrap or flowy scarf that cascades down her neck.
If it wasn’t evident before, Sara has the slender, easeful body of a dancer. And as her character
battles another dancer vying to steal her man, we see that she actually has the skill set of a
professional dancer too. She’s radiant as the end-of-day sun hits her just so.
In one scene, George’s animated camera—which the actual film’s camera mimics in a
rather meta moment—pans to find the perfect shot. Sara and Duke stroll along a row of trees
that have been planted on the perimeter of a rooftop parking lot. Duke slows his gait and looks
at Sara, “Are we supposed to talk?” Though George is making a silent film, this is
unequivocally a walk-and-talk scene. Sara understands the significance of this technique. She
says it has “something to do with the relationship between the characters, the space, the light.”
Collins was careful to avoid the stodginess of traditional storytelling. The end of Losing
Ground is as ambiguous as its beginning and middle. The film is less concerned with plot and
more so driven by intense feelings that suffuse each scene with an almost visible glow.
Through Sara and Victor, Collins manifests the tumult of an academic and a creative
15
experiencing growing pains, both in their marriage and as individuals. Neither party is all bad or
all good, but instead, their relationship is nuanced. There’s understood infidelity, an occasional
disdain for the other’s chosen field, and communication that is sometimes so direct, while
other times nonexistent. Collins forgoes a linear story structure in favor of rich character
development.
To Collins, even color is a character. In the case of Losing Ground , the color blue—in all
its varied shades—deserves a cast credit of its own. It’s hard to imagine a world in which
Collins didn’t plan all of the instances of blue in this film. The whole things feels like one big,
deliberate study in blue. This primary color moves the plot along, sets the tone of each shot,
and elicits a capital “M” mood that afflicts the audience early on and remains a constant for the
duration. The many different blues in Losing Ground capture a yearning for change, a quiet
melancholia, a lightness, a calmness, a seriousness, and even the early stages of
self-actualization.
A Selection of Blue’s Appearances in Losing Ground :
-the royal blue auditorium seats in which Sara’s students sit during her philosophy
lecture in the opening scene

-the steel blue canvas purse with the wooden handle that Sara wears to the library
when she meets Duke for the first time

-the periwinkle, knee-length summer dress Sara wears to her mother’s house

-the periwinkle dress shirt that Victor wears, with the sleeves rolled up to his wiry biceps

-Sara’s powder blue, matronly nightgown reserved for nights spent with her studies

-the cerulean Victorian house featured in the film’s very first still of Upstate New York

-the baby blue Buick that Victor drives around Upstate New York, looking for Puerto
Rican women to draw

16
-the way the camera captures New York’s shadow and light play, which makes grey
corners turn a smoky blue

-the hazy blue of dusk when George films Sara and Duke in the parking lot

-the teal of Celia’s blouse when Victor first kisses her at the dining room table, by indigo
candlelight

-Duke’s azure linen pants paired with a robin’s egg blue shirt, which he wears on his
overnight visit to Sara and Victor’s rented summer house

-the navy blue sleeping bags from a wine-fueled night spent under the stars, that turns
into a morning full of reality checks

-the icy blue water in the summer house pool that Victor wakes up and jumps into on
that morning of reality checks

It’s no wonder designers gravitate toward this hue—it’s reliable and has a flexibility of meaning
that is affected by, as Sara says, the characters, the space, and the light. And Collins, an
expert wrangler of the latter three, knew that blue could stir in the same way Sara does with
her first dance number. Or like Victor, when he captures Sara’s essence in a charcoal drawing
as she poses for him against an open window one night.
Collins also has a knack for finding beauty in the mundane. An early draft of a short
story found in her composition book from 1974 reveals an enchantment with a potential
connection between emotion and everyday objects. In her story (it is unclear if this is a work of
fiction or taken from her life), Collins ruminates on “the brightest, most cruel red lipstick” that a
woman in a five-and-dime tries to sell her. In another story, Collins’s notes show a scrupulous
decision-making process about whether or not her character should imagine herself as a nun in
a blue habit. This deep concern for aesthetic accoutrements in a story’s tangential stream of
consciousness is a testament to Collins’s cinematic way of looking at the world. She spins gold
of the world’s ordinary trappings.
17
In Losing Ground, it seems there’s almost a romance to the way set props are arranged
in each scene. The establishing shot of Sara and Victor’s apartment settles wide on a common
room bursting with Spider plants, overgrown Monstera Deliciosas, Victor’s massive abstract
pieces, and ruby red leather chairs scattered about. But if you look closely, there are all sorts of
little tchotchkes that appear to be positioned with care. Collins creates a sensibility that
extends past ‘artist’ and ‘academic.’ The arrangement of Sara and Victor’s things does allude
to the latter, but there’s an inexplicable mood that washes over the room—something
like-minded individuals can attest to, but have trouble pointing out. These days, every plant
nursery in town is perpetually out of Monsteras. “Swiss cheese plants make people feel good,”
a woman said to me once when I asked if she had any in stock. She didn’t. A new generation is
figuring out what Collins already knew to be true: there’s magic in everyday aesthetics.
It’s never mentioned in the film if Sara, too, feels moved by the color blue or if her
search for ecstasy is peripherally fueled by the hard-to-point-out charm and seduction of
seemingly hum drum objects. However, Sara radiates Collins. Even Collins’s own daughter
thinks so:
She was distant and spacey but also colorful and vibrant with a crazy loud laugh and a
lot of power. Powerful sadness but also powerful energy in general….[she] wore flowing
silk skirts with leotards….Tina Turner blaring from the stereo....mom danced around like
a madwoman, skinny arms and legs flailing.
This memory of Collins describes what seems like an evolved version of the Sara we see in the
film. Not the Sara who walks into a phonebooth one distressful afternoon to say, “I’m on shaky
ground.” But instead, the Sara who finally gets taken over by an ecstatic experience—when
she dances with Duke for the first time. Maybe Sara is a previous iteration of Collins. From one
of her many lives. Whatever the case, the parallels are undeniable.
18
Seret Scott certainly felt her character’s closeness to Collins. “A lot of Kathy is in all of
the work she wrote, and I say that now in retrospect because her way of coming at the
work—anything she wrote—was so very different from what I was used to,” she adds, “the
work that Kathy was doing had some kind of place that I had to find every single time.” A
pattern in Collins’s craft seems to be this underlying current of mystery that remains
indescribable. In the same interview, Scott says, “She would find those things, like little
buttons, that make a difference.”
Collins was a scavenger for hidden gems disguised as plants, periwinkle dresses, and
books by Genet. She gleaned beauty, romance, and of course, ecstasy, from within the cracks
that everyone else was too busy jumping over. Losing Ground is a prime example of the
wondrous places those unassuming cracks can lead you to. What’s shocking about this prime
example is that it didn’t see its theatrical premiere until 2015—that’s 33 years after its initial
release.
Dennis Doros and Amy Heller—the husband and wife duo behind Milestone
Films—distributed the restoration of Losing Ground after Collins’s daughter, Nina, managed to
rescue the original negative and create a new digital master. Milestone was established in
1990, but since 2007, its mission has been to restore and internationally distribute films
“outside the Hollywood mainstream.” As Doros and Heller put it, “We like to mess with the
canon.” This sentiment makes it all the more fitting that they’d task themselves with making a
case for Kathleen Collins—a filmmaker left out of the canon.
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’s legacy. In 2015, when Losing Ground lived to see another day, screenings of it were
met with stunned admiration. Critics found it hard to fathom how a film made three decades
19
ago could still seem so fresh. Richard Brody, a writer at The New Yorker , was perhaps the first
person to review Losing Ground . Of it he said, “A nearly lost masterwork... Losing Ground plays
like the record of a life revealed in real time.”
Elizabeth Alexander (president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the nation’s
largest funder in arts and culture, and humanities in higher education) found herself relating to
that life revealed. She writes of Losing Ground as a wish-fulfilling entity. She said, “It would be
many years before I would have the revelatory experience of seeing Losing Ground and
encountering this extraordinary black female protagonist who was dazzlingly familiar to me.”
When she finally did have the opportunity to attend a screening of the film during its re-release,
she rejoiced. In her excitement she asked, “Oh, and did I say everyone in the movie would be
beautiful, in the quotidian way of black people who are lit from within by the power of living in
the free zone of ideas and creativity?” Alexander isn’t alone in being doubled over with joy after
viewing Losing Ground. For a lot of Black creatives, it’s a rare moment of on-screen relatability
that’s long overdue. Despite not getting the wide release it deserved in the 1980’s, this film still
feels groundbreaking in the current climate.
Losing Ground introduced Sara and Victor several years before Cliff (Bill Cosby) and
Clair Huxtable (Phylicia Rashād) became a household name as the couple who has it all on The
Cosby Show . They represented the upper middle class Black intelligentsia of New York, which
until then had been uncharted territory in television. Before Cosby found himself in his current
sordid state, the sitcom used its platform to show America (and the world, via syndication) that
Black people can own fancy Brooklyn brownstones, be doctors and lawyers, collect art and
vintage jazz records, wear designer clothes, and sustain a love that’s equal parts pragmatic
and passionate. And a love that doesn’t end in dramatic death at the hands of poverty or gang
20
violence, in the trite way many Black narratives in film and television have often been wrapped
up in the past.
Black filmmakers and showrunners like Jordan Peele (Get Out) , Issa Rae ( Insecure ), and
Ava DuVernay ( Queen Sugar ) are finally able to carve out spaces to tell their stories and turn
the tide of the media landscape, but Losing Ground is a reminder that Kathleen Collins was
already itching to dismantle tired ideologies long before hashtags like #OscarsSoWhite or
#BlackGirlMagic existed. Her creative foresight suggests that she must’ve been something of
an oracle. Or maybe Kathleen Collins was simply a woman who wanted to tell her complex
stories—as others before her, and like those who’ve come after her. Losing Ground is an
heirloom for Black women. It is proof that we’ve always craved three-dimensional characters to
look up to and sophisticated storytelling to relate to.

21

References
Brody, Richard. "Lost and Found." The New Yorker. January 30, 2015. Accessed January
11, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/lost-found.
Collins, Kathleen. Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? New York, NY: Ecco, 2016.
Collins, Kathleen. Notes from a Black Woman's Diary: Selected Works of Kathleen Collins .
New York, NY: Ecco, 2019.
Collins, Nina. In-Person Interview. October 4, 2018.
Doros, Dennis, and Amy Heller. "Losing Ground." Milestone Films. Accessed January 11,
2019. https://milestonefilms.com/products/losing-ground.
Doros, Dennis and Heller, Amy. In-Person Interview. November 16, 2018.
"Kathleen Collins." Kathleen Collins. Accessed January 11, 2019. http://kathleencollins.org/.
Kathleen Collins Papers, Boxes 1-4. New York, NY. Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture. November 16, 2018.
Léger, Nathalie. Suite for Barbara Loden . St. Louis, MO: Dorothy, A Publishing Project,
2016.
Losing Ground . Directed by Kathleen Collins. Performed by Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, Duane
Jones. NY, USA: K. Collins, 1982. DVD.

22

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Kathleen Collins was born in 1942 and raised in Jersey City. She studied French at Skidmore College in Upstate New York and French Literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. During the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, Collins participated in activism with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She eventually pursued a career as a writer, filmmaker, and playwright. Her film, “Losing Ground” (1982) made her one of the very first Black women filmmakers to write and direct an independent feature. In 1988, she died of breast cancer at the young age of 46. She left behind several unproduced projects, including: plays, treatments, and manuscripts. Her daughter Nina Collins unearthed many short stories, which she published as a posthumous collection called “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” through Ecco Press in the Fall of 2016. In the Winter of 2019, Nina released “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary” through Ecco Press as well, which marked the second and (according to her) final collection of her mother’s work. Before these collections were published and before “Losing Ground” finally received proper distribution in 2015, Collins’s oeuvre had gone relatively unseen. A long overdue influx of praise today suggests that she was a gifted pioneer in her field, but simply got left out of the canon. This is the celebration of a woman, whose brilliant work was lost in time.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Dancing a legacy: movement in the wake of the Greensboro Massacre

PDF

Coming of age through my eyes

PDF

The empire business: how Netflix made television permanent

PDF

The porn star from Laguna

Asset Metadata

Creator Yohannes, Neyat (author)

Core Title Rediscovering the radical work of Kathleen Collins

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Publication Date 08/14/2019

Defense Date 08/12/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Black,Black filmmaker,Black woman,breast cancer,Ecco Press,filmmaker,Jersey City,Kathleen Collins,Losing Ground,New York,Nina Collins,OAI-PMH Harvest,Skidmore College,SNCC,Sorbonne,writer

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Page, Tim (committee chair), Anawalt, Sasha (committee member), Garcia-Myers, Sandra (committee member)

Creator Email neyat.yohannes@gmail.com,nyohanne@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-213768

Unique identifier UC11663320

Identifier etd-YohannesNe-7779.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-213768 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-YohannesNe-7779.pdf

Dmrecord 213768

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Yohannes, Neyat

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA