Borderline

A groundbreaking silent film for its explicit theme of racial prejudice and with an implicit homoerotic subtext, Borderline (1930) is a seething exploration of love, passion and betrayal, directed by Kenneth Macpherson, editor of the influential intellectual film journal Close Up (1927-33).

Highly influenced by the psychological realism of GW Pabst and Sergei Eisenstein's montage, the film is a lost classic of the British avant-garde. Borderline tells the story of a tense, inter-racial love triangle and its deadly consequences. Macpherson embellishes this story by portraying the extreme psychological states of the characters. The result is a unique and complex matrix of racial and sexual tension moving between the boundaries of black and white, male and female and the conscious and the unconscious.