Kathleen Collins’s Ecstatic Self-Discovery

Yasmina Price at the NYRB:

Black women filmmakers—not invented yesterday and invented by no one but themselves—have persistently been making imaginative work in spite of the many obstacles and restrictions they’ve faced. The sixty plus films included in a recent series at Film Forum, “Black Women: Trailblazing African American Actresses & Images, 1920–2001,” exemplify their innovative and lasting legacies. One of these, Losing Ground (1982), by the filmmaker, playwright, and novelist Kathleen Collins, is a particularly incandescent example of filmmaking as a process of defiant self-creation.

The series, curated by black film historian Donald Bogle and artist and archivist Ina Archer for Film Forum, favored the catalog of 1920s to 1960s “classical Hollywood,” featuring Hattie McDaniel, Dorothy Dandridge, Josephine Baker, and many others.

more here.