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Borderline. Kenneth Macpherson, dir. Starring Paul Robeson and H. D., with a new soundtrack by Courtney Pine. London: British Film Institute, 2007 (1930). 2 DVDs + 21-page booklet. £24.95.
Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist. New York: Criterion Collection, 2007. 4 DVDs + 78-page booklet, featuring essays by Clement Alexander Price, Hilton Als, Charles Burnett, Ian Christie, Deborah Willis, and Charles Musser. $99.95.
For many years, the film Borderline, made in 1930, was a largely inaccessible object of scholarly fascination, with copies locked away in a few archives around the world and seldom screened in public. For historians of avant-garde and experimental film-making, it represented a last, forlorn hurrah from the modernism of the 1920s, which had hoped that artistic experimentation and commercial viability need not be mutually exclusive. For feminist literary modernists, it was not only the film that H. D. starred in, but it also promised another object of study imbued by her aesthetic vision. For people interested in Paul Robeson, it was at least a fascinating footnote to his acting career, which might also offer a clue to the way that Robeson was perceived and interpreted by his modernist admirers and friends. (Fig. 1) And for cultural studies, it provided rich possibilities for analyzing the sexual complexities and racial contradictions of 1920s negrophilia.
Borderline was made in 1930 by the self-styled POOL group, an idiosyncratic triumvirate of avant-garde intellectuals with a passion for cinema: the talented but ill-disciplined young Scot, Kenneth Macpherson, the English writer and shipping heiress Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), and, of course, Hilda Doolittle, the expatriate American poet H. D. Living together in the Swiss town of Territet, these three played out an intricate minuet of sexual relationships and self-reflection on the depths of their emotions. H. D. and Bryher were already in a lifelong sexual relationship when H. D. met and embarked on an affair with Macpherson, sixteen years her junior, in 1926, the year in which her autobiographical novel Palimpsest was published. Macpherson in turn wrote his own novel about the relationship, which bordered on pastiche of his mistress's voice: Poolreflection (1927). Bryher married him and both women tried to give focus and direction to his diffuse talents. In 1927, Bryher gave Macpherson an expensive Debrie camera,...