Join us for a screening of Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground and a conversation afterwards with Nina Collins, daughter of Kathleen Collins, and Adrienne Adams, 2024-25 MAC Cinematheque Programmer and Visiting Lecturer. This is the inaugural event in the MAC Cinematheque Program.
Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground (1982; 86 minutes) chronicles the troubled marriage of Black female philosophy professor and her painter husband over the course of an idyllic summer in the Hudson Valley. One of the first feature-length motion pictures directed by a Black American woman and a National Film Registry Inductee, the film never received a commercial release. In 1988, Kathleen Collins died of breast cancer at the age of 46 and the film rarely screened. The recent 4K restoration and DVD/Blu-Ray commercial release—thanks to the work of Nina Collins, Dr. Terri Francis, the Yale Film Archives, Milestone Films, the film’s cinematographer Ronald Gray, and the film’s composer Michael Minard, among others—has enabled a new wave of screenings for this work of art, as well as Collins’ first film. Nina Collins, the daughter of Kathleen Collins and manager of her mother’s estate, will discuss the restoration process with Adrienne Adams, 2024-25 MAC Cinematheque Programmer and Visiting Lecturer, after the screening.
This event is taking place at Choi Auditorium on Occidental College’s campus. There is free street parking on Campus Road along all entrances to the college. You can find directions to Choi Auditorium on our website https://oxyarts.oxy.edu/events/losing-ground-screening-and-talk-back-nina-collins.
