Losing Ground @ 40 Panel Discussion

Originally presented on Saturday, January 28, 2023, this panel on the Form in Losing Ground and Black Independent Filmmaking brought together UCSD professor and documentary filmmaker Zeinabu Irene Davis, UC Irvine professor Philana Payton, and Cornell University professor and author Samantha Noelle Sheppard.
The panel was moderated by USC PhD candidate Alex Hack, and was preceded by a conversation on Philosophy and Ecstasy in Losing Ground between LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Georgetown professor and author of The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins, and USC assistant professor A.E. Stevenson (Recording not included).
Losing Ground, one of the first feature-length motion pictures directed by a Black American woman and a National Film Registry inductee, tells the story of a Black female philosophy professor and her abstract painter husband drifting apart as they experience separate creative evolutions. It won first prize at the Figueroa International Film Festival in Portugal in 1982 but didn’t receive an official release until it was restored in 2015, long after director Kathleen Collins died from breast cancer in 1988.
Both days of the event brought together luminary Black women filmmakers, scholars, and curators to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the pathbreaking film, introduce new audiences to Collins’s innovative practice, and convene those long inspired by it.