When artist Victor (Bill Gunn) convinces his wife Sara (Seret Scott) to adjourn to an upstate idyll for the summer, he has in mind a pastoral image of personal rejuvenation. While Sara agrees, this form of escape is far different from the hermetic, principled solitude she seeks to work on her summer research while on sabbatical from her yearly teaching engagements as a New York City philosophy professor. The contrast between Sara’s Apollonian formalism and Victor’s Dionysian overflow is immediately apparent in Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground, but it is as quickly foiled. While Sara initially appears standoffish and aloof in the manner of an impartial academic, her self-governed demeanor soon reveals a roving spirit, a mind as unquiet as it is carefully controlled, and as passionate, in as many registers, as her husband, even though she works overtime to transpose her irritations into a more analytic idiom. She is presently researching an essay or two on the philosophical discourse of “ecstatic experience,” which obviously disappoints her actress mother Leila (Billie Allen), who resonates more with Victor’s emotional vision-quest. But Collins’s screenplay is supple enough to offer the characters as both abstract typologies and living humans, already a category-confounding suggestion that the modes of experience the couple seem to live by are, in fact, fluid guidelines for organizing everyday experience rather than strict regimens that must be upheld. Without denying Victor’s interest in ecstasy, Collins also catches Victor’s subtle arrogance and dismissive celebration of emotion over philosophy, recognizing that his impatience with Sara’s analytical abstraction is also its own conceptual flattening, just as Sara’s mental enclosure, despite her skepticism about emotion, attempts its own mode of ecstatic transcendence.

Neither character finds their attempts consummatory. Each encounters another than troubles their assumptions. Victor becomes infatuated with Celia Cruz (Maritza Rivera), an ostensible muse whose bodily presence disrupts his stated desire to search for “pure” abstract form and escape the prison of representational art. Gunn understands that Victor’s elated demeanor is tinged with frustration and confusion about the kind of art that channels the hypostasized idea of “purity” he is suddenly so invested in, just as Scott intuits that Sara’s ostensibly analytic demeanor belies her searching curiosity and disappointment. While she flirts with fellow academic Duke (Duane Jones), whose enigmatic demeanor seems to combine academia and bohemia, his capacity to fulfill her seems equally up in the air.

Kathleen Collins’ script, among the first written and directed by an African American for commercial release in the United States, is framed via frustrated attempts at communication, both apparent connections that give way to difference and presumed discrepancies that imply similitude. Celia, despite her burgeoning friendship with Victor, understands everyday existence in a way that he doesn’t, and she speaks with what she calls an “American” rhythm of speech that he seems aloof to. Despite Victor’s interest in her, he still exerts a self-conscious superiority of his own explanatory ability: “if she doesn’t know Wedgewood, there’s no way I can explain it,” he remarks, signaling a gap between them that figures him as the arbiter of something like intuitive human knowledge who seems to reduce her to an object, to count himself as part of an artistic elect. This is a declaration of intuition on his part, but it’s also a judgement about the anointed of which he wishes to be a part.

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