Collins, Kathleen (1942–1988)

African-American independent filmmaker and playwright. Name variations: Kathleen Collins Prettyman. Born Kathleen Conwell Collins on March 18, 1942, in Gouldtown, New Jersey; died of cancer on September 18, 1988; attended Skidmore College and Middlebury Graduate School of French in Paris; married; children: a daughter, and two sons from a previous relationship, as well as a stepdaughter and stepson.

Filmography:

The Cruz Brothers (1979); Losing Ground (1982); Gouldtown: A Mulatto Settlement (1988). Selected plays: In the Midnight Hour, The Brothers, Only the Sky is Free (a fictional account of the life of African-American aviator Bessie Coleman ). Professor of film history and production at City College New York; finalist for the Susan Blackburn International Prize for Playwrighting.

Kathleen Collins was just coming into her own as a creative force within the African-American independent filmmaking community when she died from cancer at age 42. Collins was born in Gouldtown, a village in southern New Jersey that was founded by four separate families, each of mixed race, nearly 400 years ago. She traced her ancestry to 1623, and it was about her ancestral home that she made her last film in 1988, Gouldtown: A Mulatto Settlement.

As a child, she moved from Gouldtown to Jersey City, New Jersey, where she grew up. Collins took an undergraduate degree from Skidmore College, majoring in philosophy and religion, then did graduate work in Paris at the Middlebury School of French where she studied French literature and the cinema.

Though she is most known as a filmmaker, at first Collins considered herself a writer. In her short career, she wrote six plays, all produced, including a production of "The Brothers," which was staged during the American Place Theatre's 1982–83 season. She also wrote several short stories and four screenplays; at the time of her death, she had completed most of a novel titled Black and White Imagery.

After considerable struggle, Collins became a filmmaker during the last years of her life. She had written a script called Women, Sisters and Friends, but her attempts to raise money to produce and direct the film were futile. "This was 1971," she told David Nicholson in an interview for Black Film Review. "Nobody would give money to a black woman to direct a film."

Collins temporarily gave up and went back to writing plays. To support her children, she took a job as film editor for NET. In 1974, she was hired by City College of New York (CCNY) to teach production and screenwriting, a fortuitous move. There, she met Ronald Gray. Then a student at CCNY, Gray had so much faith in Collins' ability as a director that he put together $5,000 to finance her first film, thus becoming her co-producer. Gray was also her cinematographer on this film as he would be on later projects. Collins was not at all sure they could pull off the film on that tiny budget. "I had this crazy script by this good friend, Henry Roth, from a novel called, The Cruz Chronicles: A Novel of Adventure," Collins told Nicholson. "It was frightening… but we did it. [Ronald] and I have incredible tenacity." Titled The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy, the film was a success, though the African-American Collins was criticized for making a film about Puerto Ricans and a dying Irish woman. That type of criticism, however, was likely regarded as irrelevant by Collins. She was, in her words, a "literary filmmaker" whose creative vision was never limited by race, national boundaries or color. "I am much more concerned with how people resolve their inner dilemma in the face of external reality."

The relative success of Cruz Brothers helped Gray and Collins raise the $125,000 for what became arguably Collins' most important work, Losing Ground, possibly the first independent film to feature an African-American professional woman as the protagonist. Though it is one of the few feature films that depict a black woman with a growing feminist consciousness, Collins was quick to add that her point of view, though considered feminist, was first and always African-American. "I would like to think that there is a black aesthetic among black women filmmakers," Collins told writer Loretta Campbell . "Black women are not white women by any means; we have different approaches to life and different attitudes. Historically, we come out of different traditions."

Collins cherished her identity as a part of the larger community of black women, part of a tradition that is shared and passed on, and she was inspired by her predecessor, Lorraine Hansbury , author of Raisin in the Sun, another black woman who died young. "I have this feeling of being very connected to Lorraine Hansbury," Collins told Nicholson. "I've never found another black writer who I felt was asking the same questions…. She was able to encompass this wide range of experience from Jewish intellectuals to black middle class to Africa." The same could be said of Collins.

Kathleen Collins' premature death in 1988 was deeply felt by her friends and colleagues in the filmmaking community. The staff of Black Film Review, joining others at her memorial in New York City, spoke of the loss: "There is no other voice like Kathleen Collins' among filmmakers. Her vision 'goes to the bone' and we stand before her naked and grateful."

sources:

Aker, Ally. Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema 1896 to the Present. NY: Continuum 1991.

Campbell, Loretta. "Reinventing Our Image: Eleven Black Women Filmmakers," in Heresies. Vol. 4, 1983, p. 62.

Foster, Gwendolyn A. Women Film Directors: An International Biocritical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Klotman, Phyllis Rauch, ed. Screenplays of African-American Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.

Nicholson, David. "A Commitment to Writing: A Conversation with Kathleen Collins Prettyman," in Black Film Review. Vol. 5, no. 1. Winter 1988–89, p. 2–15.

Reid, Mark A. Redefining Black Film. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993.

Steward, William. Gouldtown: A Very Remarkable Settlement of Ancient Date. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1913.

Deborah Jones , Studio City, California