Films byTexts by Kathleen Collins
Conversation EN
2.06.2021
An Interview: Kathleen Collins

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.

Conversation EN
2.06.2021
A Commitment to Writing

A Conversation with Kathleen Collins Prettyman

“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.”

Article EN
2.06.2021
“I refuse to create mythological characters”

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.

Article EN
2.06.2021
A Place in Time and Killer of Sheep: Two Radical Definitions of Adventure Minus Women

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.

note EN
16.06.2019
New Book Releases / June 2019

A list of summer reads including recent and forthcoming books by Chantal Akerman, Luc Dardenne, Gilberto Perez and Kathleen Collins.

FILM
Losing Ground
Kathleen Collins, 1982, 86’

One of the first feature films directed by an African American woman, Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground tells the story of a marriage between two remarkable people, both at a crossroads in their lives.