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Rent Borderline (1930)

3.3 of 5 from 55 ratings
1h 11min
  • General info
  • Available formats
Synopsis:
Borderline occupies a unique place in British cinema history. Kenneth Macpherson's masterpiece was made only a year after Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and it features iconic star Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda, as well as other members from the editorial board of the film journal Close Up, such as the post H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Robert Herring and Bryther. Heavily influenced by the psychological realism of G W Pabst and Sergei Eisenstein's montage, Borderline is a matrix of racial and sexual tension moving between the boundaries of black and white, male and female and the conscious and the unconscious.
Actors:
, , Hilda Doolittle, Gavin Arthur, Charlotte Arthur, Blanche Lewin
Directors:
Writers:
Kenneth MacPherson
Studio:
BFI Video
Genres:
Drama
Collections:
A World of Difference: A History of Gay Cinema, Getting to Know: Denzel Washington
BBFC:
Release Date:
14/05/2007
Run Time:
71 minutes
Languages:
Silent
DVD Regions:
Region 2
Formats:
Pal
Aspect Ratio:
Full Screen 1.33:1 / 4:3
Colour:
B & W
Bonus:
  • Filmed interview with Courtney Pine
  • Kenwin by Veronique Goel
  • Close up by Veronique Goel
  • Trailers for Dreams that money can buy and Pink Narcissus
Disc 1:
This disc includes the main feature
Disc 2:
This disc includes the special features

More like Borderline

Reviews (1) of Borderline

Night and Daze - Borderline review by CH

Spoiler Alert
16/11/2020

“I was a passionate reader of Close-Up which was edited by Kenneth Macpherson and Bryher and published from a chateau in Switzerland. Marc Allégret was the Paris Correspondent and Pudovkin contributed articles on montage.” So Graham Greene recalled of his time at Oxford in the Twenties, where his enthusiasm for film - necessarily silent film - increased, and was an influence upon his writing of fiction.

One would like to know if he saw Borderline (1930). This was a silent film written and directed by that editor Macpherson himself, and, along with Bryher, it featured her close friend the poet known as HD (Hilda Doolittle) - as well as Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda.

This is set in a Swiss village, where Eslanda has not only caused outrage by having an affair with a white man but brought marital difficulties for all concerned. That is the broadest outline of a film which turns less upon narrative - with scant inter-titles – than an abundance of montage, of dissolves from one image to another, faces caught in half-shadow as revenge and despair work alongside each other, with a knife to the fore at one moment. Close-up is indeed the term which it brings to mind throughout its seventy minutes.

One surrenders to it, is caught up by the pacing, and watches it a second time (it gains from knowing the outline the next time around). For the current DVD issue, there is a modern-jazz soundtrack by Courtney Pine, who talks very interestingly about his work on this during an “extra” item on the disc, and the excellent music works to best effect with the volume lowered: its switches of pace are of a piece with the fast editing of the film itself.

Pine remarks that he saw the film “about thirty-seven times” (a curious mixture of the general and the specific) while writing the music. A contrast with Miles Davis, one reflects, who improvised his score for Lift to the Scaffold while watching it screened for him.

A film, then, in which to lose and find oneself - and perhaps explore the Bohemian lives of those involved in its making (Bryher's novel about a teashop in the Blitz has just been reissued).

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