It is very difficult to write a review of this experimental silent film. The people involved in making it (in Switzerland) are very interesting people for numerous reasons. Of some of them, no other moving film images exist. And then there is the strange presence of Paul Robeson in a film without sound, so that he has no chance to sing with that magnificent voice, as his rendition of 'Ole Man River' in SHOW BOAT (1936, see my review) has made so famous to those who might not otherwise have heard of him. During his lifetime he was very famous, but memories fade and people are soon forgotten, even people as tall, forceful and charismatic as he was. Here he appears in numerous shots shooting up at his face shown against clouds in the sky, as if he were a god. The director must have had a crush on him. Robeson's wife Eslanda Robeson also appears in the film opposite him, which was her only credited appearance in a film (she appeared in two later ones uncredited). Apart from the Robesons, none of the actors in this film ever appeared in another film. Despite their complete lack of training or experience, they all do a really good job. Moral: is drama school really necessary? Before describing the largely incomprehensible film itself, we need to consider the personalities involved, apart from the Robesons whom I have already mentioned. The key figures were the lesbian couple consisting of Hilda Doolittle, who wrote under the pseudonym H. D., and Winifred Ellerman, who wrote under the pseudonym of Bryher (the name of her favourite Scilly Isle). Although Bryher's work is largely forgotten today, the poetry of the famous imagist poetess H. D. is very much still in print and continues to be highly regarded, not least by myself, I must say. I have some of her early publications including one or two signed by her. She and Ezra Pound had a fling when they were young together in Philadelphia. She later moved to London to join Ezra and Dorothy Pound. Dorothy told me that in those days her two closest friends were Hilda Doolittle and Gaudier-Brzeska, and she truly adored them both. (Gaudier was at that time having his affair with Nina Hamnett.) Hilda lived in the same building with the Pounds for a while in Kensington, but she did not follow them to Paris and Rapallo later. Bryher married Robert McAlmon in order to hide from her parents the fact that she was gay. McAlmon was gay himself, so the marriage was for show. For an account of all this one should read McAlmon's wonderful memoir BEING GENIUSES TOGETHER. (It is very much better to read the original than the heavily edited and hacked-about version by Kay Boyle.) In 1927, Bryher tired of McAlmon and divorced him, marrying instead Kenneth MacPherson, who directed this film and also had been having an affair with H.D., who unlike Bryher was vaguely bisexual. They all lived together. All three of them were film-mad and they founded an arty film magazine called CLOSE UP in 1927, which lasted for a few years. I do not have a complete set of it, alas, but I do have a bound volume of numerous issues. They also founded an entity of some kind called Pool to make some experimental films, of which this is apparently the only survival. They had meanwhile introduced Sergei Eisenstein's films to the Western world. This film has countless examples of jump shots and rapid editing in imitation of Eisenstein's style, without the ability to make it work effectively, however. But at least MacPherson was trying. They had all seen and been influenced by the earlier silent experimental films of Man Ray, and this film is much better than anything he ever achieved on cinema. They were also heavily influenced by the German expressionists, as the angles and shots and atmosphere show clearly. To go into all their theories about the cinema would be out of place here, as taking too long. This film therefore has historical significance both for the history of experimental filmmaking and for those interested in the people appearing in it, and many of those will perhaps have little or no knowledge of or concern for the cinema per se. Lovers of poetry will get a shock when they see Hilda Doolittle, because her photos tend to be idealised and serene, but when you see her in this you can see how scary and weird she really was. She wrote a lot about ancient Greece, which was her chief obsession, but if one were to class her as a character at that time, one would have to place her amongst the maenads. One wonders whether one would really have wanted to know them. Both they and the film itself, and much that they wrote as well, concern extremes of passion. I don't have much interest in extreme passions myself, being too cerebral perhaps. And anyway, extreme passions do take up a lot of time and require a great expenditure of energy which could more profitably be put to use in studying something far more interesting. But this film is nothing but extreme passion, shown disjointedly and with insufficient continuity to make out who is really doing what to whom or why. Hilda Doolittle ends up dead, which is pretty shocking. It all goes to show that quarrelling lovers should never play with knives. The protracted knife scene in this film is very harrowing. The film also strenuously promotes the cause of black people, and as an example of racial prejudice, has a little old lady saying that all 'negroes' should be removed from Switzerland immediately (another n word is used also which I do not repeat). In the story it seems that Hilda's husband has had an affair with Robeson's wife and it drives them all mad. Most of the film consists of them being overwrought.
Review of Borderline
