Saturday Breakfast Film Club: Borderline

This new, curated programme of cult and alternative art films, specially selected to provide extra context to Towner's exhibitions, will begin on 14 June. Each screening is accompanied by a short introduction from film writer Henry Jordan. The first films in the series link to exhibitions Paule Vézelay: Living Lines and Sussex Modernism. 

14 June: The Seashell and the Clergyman
12 July: Borderline
13 September: Daisies

Dr Hope Wolf is an Associate Professor in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Sussex. She is curator of the Towner exhibition Sussex Modernism, and author of a book of the same name published by Yale University Press in April 2025.

Borderline occupies a unique place in British cinema history. Kenneth Macpherson's film was made only a year after Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and it features iconic star Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda, as well as other members from the editorial board of the film journal Close up such as poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Robert Herring and Bryher.

Heavily influenced by the psychological realism of G W Pabst and Sergei Eisenstein's montage, Borderline is a matrix of racial and sexual tension moving between the boundaries of black and white, male and female and the conscious and the unconscious.

Borderline will be introduced by Dr Hope Wolf, curator of the exhibition Sussex Modernism and University of Sussex lecturer in British Modernist Literature and co-director of the University's Centre for Modernist Studies.

A score by jazz musician Courtney Pine accompanies this screening of the film at Towner. 

Content Warning: This film contains racism - including uses of the n-word, a racial slur. Viewer discretion is advised.

This film is programmed as part of the public programme for Sussex Modernism