Breaking Sacred Ground

The Cinema of Kathleen Collins

14.11.2023
A COLLECTION OF 4 texts, 2 film pages
EN

Born in 1942, raised in Jersey City, and educated at Skidmore and the Sorbonne, Kathleen Collins was an activist with SNCC during the Civil Rights Movement who went on to carve out a career for herself as a playwright and filmmaker, during a time when black women were rarely seen in those roles. She was married twice and had two children, who she raised in Piermont, New York. She died young, at age 46, from breast cancer. Her most known work is the film Losing Ground from 1982, which went largely unseen for more than thirty years before being released in 2015. Two never-before released collections of her writings, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? and Notes from a Black Woman's Diary were published in 2016 and 2019, to much acclaim.1

Texts

Oliver Franklin, 1981
CONVERSATION
02.06.2021
EN

I think of myself as someone who has an instinctual understanding of what it is to be a minority person. That is someone whose existence is highly marginal in the society and understands it in the gut but will not be dominated by it. Therefore, I refuse all of those labels, such as Black Woman Filmmaker, because I believe in my work as something that can be looked at without labels.

A Conversation with Kathleen Collins Prettyman

David Nicholson, 1986
CONVERSATION
02.06.2021
EN

“The thing that writing teaches you, which is probably the thing I’ve discovered that I know best about, is the mastery of form. And each discipline is really an exercise in understanding what is allowable in the structure of that particular form. Screenplay writing has curves and you have to write for the curves of the story.”

Kathleen Collins, 1984
ARTICLE
02.06.2021
EN

In order to get at how I think about making a movie at a low budget, I have to be able to give you the theory, the narrative theory, that supports my reasons for making movies. If any of you have seen my work, you know I’m only interested in telling stories, and most of those stories are fairly contemporary. And to some degree they are ahistorical, meaning, though I think that is going to change, that the focus of the work is entirely narrative in orientation.

Kathleen Collins, 1977
ARTICLE
02.06.2021
EN

It would be more than fair to say that in American films, the motif of adventure is one of the favorite story-telling devices. So many films come to mind – from the most banal to the most memorable of the western, detective, and war genre films of the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s to the rash of modern-day science fiction films patterned on the Star Wars or Close Encounters formulas. (...) Two other films stand out in my mind that take the adventure story theme to another level, and therefore deserve a closer look: Charles Lane’s A Place in Time, and Charles Burnett’s Killer Of Sheep.

Film Pages