The Film Society of Lincoln Center earlier this
year ran an important series entitled "Tell It Like It Is: BlackIndependents in New York, 1968 – 1986." Running over the course of
two weeks (February 6-19) and programmed by Jake Perlin and Michelle Materre,
Tell It Like It Is featured a startling twenty-five screening programs.
Included were screenings of relatively well known films such as She's
Gotta Have It (1986) and Ganja and Hess (1973), known but rarely
seen movies like Spike Lee's NYU Master's thesis project, Joe’s Bed-Stuy
Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983), and many lesser-known (at least to this
writer!) pictures including Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), A
Dream Is What You Wake Up From (1978), and special evenings with filmmakers
Jessie Maple, Kent Garrett, and Madeline Anderson. Indeed, even when not
pointedly labeled as “special evenings”, almost all of the programs were
accompanied by introductions and Q&A sessions with some person or persons
involved with the production of the film, or related to the filmmaker.
Where possible (at least ten of the shows) films were shown on film (some
16mm, some 35mm), but many titles were projected from DCPs or in other
non-specified forms of “digital projection”.
Film Society’s website for Tell It Like It Is
says that “[r]epresenting highlights of New York–based independents, activists
all—producing these films in a time when minority film production was not
supported and frequently suppressed—this program is full of major works by some
of the great filmmakers of this (or any) era in American film history.”
And indeed, unsupported and suppressed at these films often were, many of
them have not been readily available for viewing. Several of the programs
exhibited were originally shown on television, and few – including both the
television and the theatrical works – are available on any form of home video
today. Many never were. And while
Film Society also asserts that the series “is comprised of key films produced
between 1968 and 1986, when Spike Lee’s first feature, the independently
produced She’s Gotta Have It, was released theatrically—and followed by
a new era of studio filmmaking by black directors”, the programming of the
series seems to aim at least as much to canonize great but underappreciated
films as it does to revive widely recognized classics.
Indeed, one of the movies to open the series
was Kathleen Collins's Losing Ground (1982), a film that ought to be a
recognized classic, but which had never until now received the recognition it
deserved. Billed as "one of the first feature films written and
directed by a black woman"[1], the
film was completed in 1982 and aired once in 1987 on WNET, but otherwise went
unreleased until now. A year after that one television showing, Collins
died tragically young from cancer. But
her daughter Nina, who introduced her mother’s movies on the opening night of
the series, recently took out the negatives to Losing Ground and the
director’s earlier film, The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy, and had new
digital masters produced because "it was important for black history, andfeminist history, and because it was my mother's".
The films were then picked up by Milestone Films, an independent
distributor that specializes in championing un- and under-seen older works,
with a particular focus on films by minority filmmakers (Milestone is the
company responsible for bringing such films as Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba
[1964, revived by Milestone in 1995], Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep
[1978, brought out by Milestone in 2007], and Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles
[1961, Milestoned in 2008]). They opened Losing Ground at Tell It
Like It Is, where its run was extended to the entire duration of the festival,
and are now promoting it for further screenings around the world, apparently
ahead of an eventual home video release. Important question: If a film
sits in the can, unreleased for a third of a century, and then finally receives
a theatrical release, is it eligible for Academy Awards in the year of its
eventual release? If so, I hope Milestone is gearing up for an Oscars
campaign, because this movie is sensational!
The film stars the underused Seret Scott as
Sara, a City College professor of philosophy married to Victor (Bill Gunn, Ganja
and Hess), a slightly older artist who is simultaneously achieving great
critical success as a painter and coming into a midlife crisis. Just as
he has made a great sale of a non-representational work to a major museum, he
begins to consider that his true calling may be representational work, after
all. As her academic year draws to a close, Sara makes plans to spend the
summer researching and writing a dissertation on the ecstatic experience; at
the same time, as Victor’s sale is being finalized, he gets the idea that they should
rent a summer house in some lower Hudson Valley town (much of the film was shot
in Nyack), where he will have loads of lovely architecture, natural landscapes,
and beautiful women to paint. This conflicts with Sara’s plans, since in
the pre-internet days in which the film was made, scholarly work like hers was
bound to the kind of physical research libraries available in New York City,
but not in most towns upstate. She is angered by his disregard for the
needs of her work, but agrees to have a go at doing her work outside the city,
driving back to New York as needed.
This arrangement goes alright for awhile, but
when Victor becomes overly affectionate toward his beautiful young model,
Celia, Sara decides she has had enough and decides that on her next trip to New
York, she will take up a previously declined invitation to star in the thesis
film of one of her adoring students. Victor is at first surprised and a
little condescending toward her intention to act, but doesn’t fight her.
But he becomes enraged and frustrated when she calls him on the phone and
projects that she will be gone filming for five days.
On set she
grows close to – and begins to find herself attracted to – Duke (Duane Jones, Night
of the Living Dead), the uncle of the student whose film she is acting in.
The film they are shooting is a wordless, balletic adaptation of the traditional
ballad “Frankie and Johnny”, telling the story of a married man drawn away from
his wife by a dancing girl, and the wife’s efforts, shall we say (in the spirit
of avoiding spoilers for either Losing Ground or “Frankie and Johnny”!),
to get him back. The scenes from the
film-within-a-film – which is more or less presented to the
audience as a ridiculous but heartfelt work by a goofy, joyful young man – are
among the highlights of Losing Ground. Shot on the huge concrete
“academic platform” of one of the CUNY campuses, they simultaneously evoke the
not necessarily desired minimalism of a student film and an abstracted space
outside of reality, and are thus able to function both literally and
expressionistically. The “Frankie and
Johnny” film story has obvious parallels to Sara’s own life, and in a series of
powerful scenes, the story and themes of the larger film are explored and
commented upon through these flamboyantly costumed and choreographed dance
scenes.
When Collins’s
films opened the Tell It Like It Is series, they were shown in the Walter Reade
Theater, Lincoln Center’s largest (it has 268 seats) and oldest cinema, with a
live introduction by Nina Collins. The
release was a critical and box office success, resulting in its extension to
the end of the month. By the time of the
screening I attended – late in the series around 5 PM on a Friday – the film
had been moved over to the much smaller Howard Gilman Theater (seats 85), which
was filled to about one quarter of capacity. Not surprisingly for an audience
of that size at that time of day and at that point in the run, the reaction was
appreciative (laughter and small gasps where appropriate), but not overly
vociferous. But in talking with
coworkers and friends over the course of February, responses to the series were
positive. Many acknowledged their
unfamiliarity with the films, but expressed great pleasure at the opportunity
to expand their horizons, and then genuine appreciation for the films they had
seen. Correspondents who saw Symbiopsychotaxiplasm:
Take One and Ganja and Hess, and others who attended screenings of Losing
Ground, all expressed a sense of slight dismay that they had not previously
been aware of the films they saw, and great admiration for them afterward.
That many of
these films have not been available until now is frankly an injustice. The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s efforts
in locating and clearing the prints and digital files to put the series
together are to be admired, and it is deeply gratifying that the wonderful
people at Milestone are reintroducing the world to Losing Ground and The
Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy; the more so since it appears they will be
publishing them on home video. The opportunity presented by series of
this kind for many people to see great works that they might otherwise have
missed can be critical in forming new “canons”.
With the success of Tell It Like It Is, there is reason to believe that
some of the films shown could at least be said to have been beatified, if not
yet canonized all the way. Hopefully
with this newfound attention, many more of them will find new avenues of
distribution on DVD, Blu-ray, and digital streaming services.
For additional information on the film, including a synopsis, cast and crew
lists, biographies, personal stories about the film’s production and about
Kathleen Collins, an excellent interview with Collins, and much more, see
Milestone’s exhaustive press release here:
[1] The
prize for the first is a bit tangled, given the independent nature of
most films made by black women in those days and non-uniform definitions of the
term “feature”. One contender is
Collins’s other film, The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980), which
she intended to be about thirty minutes long, but which grew to fifty –
“feature length” by the Academy’s standards, if not your average
moviegoer’s! Another narrative film,
Jessie Maple’s Will (which was also recently restored, and also played
in Tell It Like It Is!) was released in 1981 and ran to a solidly feature
length running time of seventy minutes, so while Collins may have made the
first, she may not have, and Losing Ground was, in any event, not
it. All of this is record-book business,
however, and must in no way be taken to diminish the merits of any of the films.
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