Borderline

In a border village a white man's affair with a Black woman ends in his white lover's death, and the village turns on the Black woman's husband, who has done nothing. Paul Robeson is the husband, and Kenneth Macpherson cuts on faces and objects in the Soviet manner and lets Robeson stand still inside the montage. Eslanda Robeson, the poet H.D. and Bryher are in the cast; Macpherson edited the film journal Close Up and this was his one feature. An amateur film in the strict sense, made by people who had thought harder about cinema than most professionals, ignored for decades and restored by the BFI. Pool Group, Territet, Switzerland, 1930.