All of the films can be streamed on The Criterion Channel, which offers a one-week free trial.
‘Losing Ground’ (1982) — ★★★★★
Directed by Kathleen Collins
During the quiet hours of ‘80s feminism — between the decline of second-wave feminism and subsequent rise of the third — filmmaker Kathleen Collins rose loud with “Losing Ground,” reimagining the cinematic climax of a female protagonist.
The film studies a growing bitterness between philosophy professor Sara (Seret Scott) and her artist husband Victor (Bill Gunn) in New York. The couple’s careers don’t fall too far from their personas — Sara researches ecstasy, while Victor pursues his own ecstasy by having affairs with art models. This adultery comes to undress too much of Sara’s traditional poise, leaving her vulnerable to a psychic’s take on her true soulmate. Then swoops in a mystical man who checks all the boxes.
Far beyond the basic bones of a love triangle, this film has meat — taut and full with the muscle of female spirituality and intellectual curiosity. Rather than floating the plot on Sara’s final choice of man, Collins anchors it in Sara’s ability to choose in the first place. Let’s drop Freytag’s Pyramid — Hollywood’s favorite model for step-by-step storytelling — as “Losing Ground” liberates the possibility of resolution, especially for Black women.
‘Daughters of the Dust’ (1991) — ★★★★½
Directed by Julie Dash
As the early-’90s American film scene sprinted straight for cyber, futuristic, and grungy aesthetics, filmmaker Julie Dash was looking the other way. Situating “Daughters of the Dust” nearly a century prior in 1902, Dash reached for natural aesthetics attuned to Gullah Geechee and African cultures. Years later, her decision to delve into history would influence 2010s pop culture, most notably Beyoncé’s album “Lemonade.”
The film centers the spiritual and religious worlds of a matrimonial family living off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia. Despite the promise of a more comfortable life up north, elder Nana Peazant (Cora Lee Day) honors her ancestry, digging her feet deep into that warm Southern sand. Meanwhile, her married daughter Eula (Alva Rogers) is dealt spiritual turmoil after the physical violation of her body, and later, questions jabbing at the baby’s father.
Where other films feel obligated to unpack a linear plot, “Daughters of the Dust” feels out where the plot feels the thickest. A cherry-on-top narration by Eula’s Unborn Child further elevates the film to a two-for-one visual poem. It’s no wonder why Dash inspired a court of media production in her honor.
‘Compensation’ (1999) — ★★★★★
Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis
One call buzzes the rotary in 1910 during the tuberculosis crisis. Another rings the landline in 1993 amid the AIDS epidemic. Who but filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis could pick up both phones — and her camera — at once to produce “Compensation,” a dual history in conversation with the head and tail ends of Chicago’s 20th century?
Each timeline features a similar dynamic of lovers: a deaf woman (Michelle A. Banks) and a hearing man (John Earl Jelks). Davis fashions their stories through a number of intimate scenarios on ability, from hearing and reading to quarantining. While the 1910 couple sits in silent film, the 1993 couple is figured with greater audio output — a directorial decision reflecting their diverging storylines.
Just when you thought her intelligence was as worldly as could be, Davis reveals an extraterrestrial third hand to connect cinema to literature. The film takes after Black writer Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Compensation,” a quippy eight-line poem that branches into two stories rendering love as a vehicle — one where it drives life, and one where it arrives at death. The film offers an original push-and-pull interpretation of circumstance, saying, you can get close to desire if you act with intention, but fate can always drag you away.
