Borderline Modernism

The silent 1930 film Borderline has long attracted the archival interest of modernist scholars because it features Paul and Eslanda Robeson as well as the American expatriate poet Hilda Doolittle (or H.D. as she became known). However, the film has been largely sequestered in the vaults of the Museum of Modern Art, not available commercially and rarely screened. G.W. Pabst (the director H.D. most admired) called Borderline "the only real avant-garde film," yet its avant-gardism to some extent may have doomed it to obscurity (Cinema and Modernism 389). It recently surfaced as part of a Robeson retrospective on American Movie Classics, which suggests that perhaps the film is breaking out of the circumscribed locus of the archive into a wider cultural forum. As a result of the limited audiences for Borderline, Robeson's significant role in the film has been understated in the history of black cinema as well as in more general studies of early cinema and modernism. However, to assert that Robeson's contribution and the film's place in American film have been overlooked merely as a result of its limited distribution would be a tremendous oversimplification of a complicated intersection of cultural and aesthetic vectors

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