Kathleen Collins’s independent landmark LOSING GROUND is a luminous, brilliantly perceptive portrait of a marriage at a crossroads and a woman’s emotional awakening. One of the first films to explore black female desire with nuance and philosophical complexity, it contains a key allusion to actress Pearl McCormack and her role in the 1927 race film THE SCAR OF SHAME, a fascinating silent melodrama that, like LOSING GROUND, touches on issues of class and African American social mobility. Made more than fifty years apart, these touchstone works—once neglected, now cherished—speak to a rich counterhistory of black filmmaking that extends across generations.