Losing Ground

“I want magic,” Sara declares. “Real magic.” A philosopher professor, Sara (Seret Scott), lives with her husband, Victor (Bill Gunn), in a loft dominated by his large canvases. Soon after the movie opens, Victor shares that one of his paintings has been bought by a museum. “I’m a genuine success,” he enthuses, “your husband is a genuine black success!” Identity — aesthetic, racial, sexual — is among the themes that wend through this film, which follows Sara as she sets off to intellectually understand ecstasy while contending with her husband’s restlessness (and ego), seeking a space of her own and appearing in a student movie that riffs on “Frankie and Johnny.” Ms. Collins — a playwright, a professor and one of the first black American women to direct a feature-length movie — was only 46 when she died in 1988 from cancer. Her death deprived American cinema of a singular and exciting independent voice, one that has re-emerged with the posthumous theatrical release of “Losing Ground” and with the publication of her well-received short-story collection, “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” — Manohla Dargis