Rent Borderline (1930)

Night and Daze - Borderline review by CH

“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).