Borderline (1930, Kenneth Macpherson) (Patreon)

62/100

Always fun to be caught completely off-guard. This is one of several films that I'd never heard of from Criterion's box set devoted to Paul Robeson; since Macpherson was likewise unfamiliar to me, I just assumed that I'd be watching some nondescript early-sound melodrama, remembered today solely because Robeson is among the cast. 

Less than four minutes later: WTF am I watching?!?

Turns out Macpherson was part of a collective called the Pool Group, which published its own film journal ca. 1927–33 and was virulently anti-sound (which made me feel guilty for watching Borderline with its accompanying musical score—I tried total silence for a few minutes, but that still fundamentally weirds me out). Their movies verged on avant-garde, and that's immediately apparent here: No context whatsoever is provided for Borderline's initial flurry of images, which seek to generate emotion strictly from intense expressions, violent actions and frenetic editing. While a narrative eventually emerges, involving two relationships threatened by interracial infidelity, it's so neglible as to be almost irrelevant (despite addressing British racism more bluntly than any other film I've yet seen from this period); Macpherson mostly just wants to demonstrate the way that he believes cinema should work, building upon Eisenstein's theory of montage. The result is a film that's never dramatically interesting but always formally exciting, reaching its apex with a knife attack shot and cut in a way that anticipates Psycho's shower scene fully three decades beforehand. Robeson doesn't get much of an opportunity to act per se, as his character is the most relaxed and self-assured of the main quartet (a quality perhaps enhanced by the fact that he plays many scenes opposite his actual wife, Eslanda Robeson, who looks remarkably like Zazie Beetz, or I guess vice versa), and it's avant-garde poet H.D. (actual name Hilda Doolittle, billed for some reason as Helga Doorn), then 44 years old, who truly stands out as a terrifying avatar of the proverbial woman scorned. Some pointed queer-tinged stuff happening in the margins, too, unless I'm badly misreading one actor's look and demeanor. Ultimately, this is too skimpy for its own good in every respect save that of pure technique, but it's an order of magnitude more fascinating than I'd expected.