Losing ground / a Milestone Film release ; producer, Eleanor Charles ; written by Kathleen Collins ; direction, Kathleen Collins ; Losing Ground Productions.
Cruz brothers and Miss Malloy. Transmagnifican dambamuality.
Notes:
Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, Duane Jones, Maritza Rivera, Billie Allen, Gary Bolling, Norberto Kerner. Originally produced as a motion picture in 1982; never theatrically released. Produced with grants from the American Film Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts. Special features on disc 1: commentary track by professors LaMonda Horton-Stallings and Terri Francis; 2015 theatrical trailer. Special features on disc 2: The Cruz brothers and Miss Malloy (1980, 50 min.), Kathleen Collins and Ronald K. Gray's first film; video interviews with Ronald K. Gray (46:30), Seret Scott (40:17), Nina Lorez Collins (26:24); an interview with Kathleen Collins by Phyllis R. Klotman (1982, 22 min.); Transmagnifican dambamuality (1976, 7 min., black and white), Ronald K. Gray's celebrated "lost" student film.
Contents:
disc 1. Losing ground -- disc 2. The Cruz brothers and Miss Malloy.
Summary:
Losing Ground tells the story of a marriage of two remarkable people, both at a crossroads in their lives. Sara Rogers, a black professor of philosophy, is embarking on an intellectual quest to understand "ecstasy" just as her painter husband Victor sets off on a more earthly exploration of joy. Celebrating a recent museum sale, Victor decides to rent a country house where he can return to more realism after years working as an abstract expressionist. Away from the city, the couple's summer idyll becomes complicated by Sara's research and by Victor's involvement with a young model. When one of her students casts Sara as the woman scorned in a film version of the song "Frankie and Johnny," she experiences a painful emotional awakening. One of the first fictional features by an African-American woman.
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