Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 51: Fri Feb 20

Borderline (Macpherson, 1930): Tate Modern, 6.30pm


This is screening as part of 'The Black Subject: Ancient and Modern' season at the Tate. You can find all the details here.

Here is the Tate's introduction to this groundbreaking film:
Borderline (1930) is a silent film with an explicit theme of racial prejudice and an implicit homoerotic subtext. Directed by Kenneth Macpherson, editor of the influential intellectual film journal Close Up (1927–33) it is highly influenced by the psychological realism of GW Pabst and Sergei Eisenstein’s montage.  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. This version of the film includes a score by jazz musician Courtney Pine. 

The screening will be followed by a discussion with Prof. Laura Marcus (Oxford University) and writer and critic Prof. Sukhdev Sandhu (NYU), chaired by Tate curator Sonya Dyer. 

Here (and above) is an extract.

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