Description:

Losing Ground
(Kathleen Collins, 1982, USA, DCP, 86 min.)

The work of Kathleen Collins is one of the great discoveries of the last decade, with the release of Losing Ground and publication of her writings. Collins died at age 46 in 1988, leaving behind two films and a vast trove of short stories, diaries, and screenplays; a rich artistic legacy exploring the African-American experience. In Losing Ground, Collins tells the semi-autobiographical story of a college professor (Seret Scott) and her painter husband (Bill Gunn) whose marriage is tested by his disregard for her career, flirtatious behavior on both sides, and jealousy as they summer away from the city.

Visual Pleasures: The Work and Play of Women’s Liberation
This year’s One Book One Northwestern selection, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, imagines how the hard-fought economic and sexual freedoms won by the women’s movement might be stripped away. The films in this series, co-presented with One Book, the Northwestern Women’s Center, and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, manifest those freedoms in both form and content. Visual Pleasures encompasses both mainstream comedies of empowerment and experimental representations of desire through a distinctly female gaze, celebrating liberation through a spectrum of cinematic forms.