Choi Auditorium, Occidental College.
This event is free and open to the public. No RSVP required.
Join the Media Arts and Culture Department, Oxy Arts, and the Black Alumni Organization for a screening of Kathleen Collins' Losing Ground (1982) and a conversation afterwards with Nina Collins, daughter of Kathleen Collins, and Adrienne Adams (Class of 2017), 2024-25 MAC Cinematheque Programmer and Visiting Lecturer. This is the inaugural event in the MAC Cinematheque program season on Analog@Oxy: Race, Sex, Technological Obsolescence. The 4-part event series runs in conjunction with the Oxy Arts/Getty PST ART exhibition Invisibility: Powers & Perils.
Originally filmed on 16mm, Kathleen Collins' Losing Ground (1982; 86 minutes) chronicles the troubled marriage of a Black female philosophy professor and her abstract painter husband as they explore disparate notions of ecstasy. 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 literary executor of her mother's estate, will discuss the restoration process with Adrienne Adams after the screening.
The 2024-25 Cinematheque series is organized by the Media Arts & Culture Department and Oxy Arts in conjunction with the Center for Community-Based Learning and American Studies Department, with generous support from the Remsen Bird Fund and Mellon Foundation.
This screening and talk-back is made possible with the support of the aforementioned entities, Black Alumni Organization, and Spanish & French Studies Department.
This is a Core 99 event.
This event is taking place at Choi Auditorium, located on the second floor of Johnson Hall, 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 here.
