Creativity in Motion: A Rare Screening of Losing Ground and Lecture by Alix Beeston

At the time of her death from cancer in 1988, Kathleen Collins was only 46 years old, but she was already an internationally renowned playwright, a popular university professor, and a successful independent filmmaker. Her 1982 film Losing Ground was one of the first fictional features by a Black woman in the US, and it should have ranked high in the canon of indie cinema. However, the 1980s was not an easy time for women or independent filmmakers and the film was never theatrically released.

Some 25 years after her mother’s death, Nina Collins rescued the original negative and created a beautiful new digital master of her mother’s film. Losing Ground now looks and sounds as fresh, bracing, and complex as it did when it was first filmed. A remarkable portrait of a woman's self-discovery amid her failing marriage, the film is a testament to Kathleen Collins’s incredible talent and a lasting treasure of African American and women’s cinema.

Losing Ground will be introduced by Dr. Alix Beeston, GATES Senior Research Fellow, and followed by a lecture by Dr. Beeston exploring Collins's "creativity in motion" and the value of studying women's unfinished works and careers. Tea and coffee will be served between the screening and lecture, and attendees will have the chance to participate in Q and A at the conclusion of the talk. 

Note that the film and lecture will be in English.

Programme:

• Screening of Losing Ground: 2:00pm
• Break: 3:45pm
• Talk by Alix Beeston: 4:15pm

Dr. Alix Beeston is Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at Cardiff University. Her work advances interdisciplinary approaches to literature, film, and photography in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while also experimenting with new modes of scholarly writing and dissemination. She is the author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford University Press, 2018, paperback 2023) and a forthcoming critical–creative book tentatively titled Image Encounters: Photography and the Feminist Art of Being Seen. With Stefan Solomon, she co-edited the award-winning book Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unifnished Film (University of California Press, 2023). Dr. Beeston's ongoing research on women's unfinished creative work includes a volume of Kathleen Collins's plays and screenplays, which she is co-editing with Hayley O'Malley and Samantha N. Sheppard, forthcoming from the University of California Press in 2027.

Supported by the GATES project (Grenoble ATtractiveness and ExcellenceS), funded by the French government's Programme d'Investissement Avenir and implemented by ANR France 2030