“H.D. doesn’t sound modern—she sounds timeless….one of the most riveting stories in American poetry."
—Ange Mlinko, The New York Review of Books

To celebrate the reissue of H.D.’s autobiographical novel HERmione, her radical portrait of an artist’s life, New Directions and e-flux Screening Room are pleased to present a screening of Kenneth Macpherson’s _Borderline _(1930, 60 minutes) on Tuesday, November 8 at 7pm, followed by a discussion with Francesca Wade, author of the new introduction to HERmione.

“Borderline tells the story of an interracial affair that scandalizes a small European village and threatens to tear apart two couples. British film theorist Macpherson infused the melodrama, his first and only feature, with a startling degree of intensity, merging the montage style of Sergei Eisenstein and the psychological realism of G. W. Pabst to convey the devastating emotional effect of racial prejudice and sexual oppression. In the words of the modernist poet H. D., who costars in the film alongside Robeson and his wife, Eslanda, the director “sculpts literally with light. He gouges, he reveals, he conceals.”
—Criterion Collection

Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (2020). She has received grants from the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation and the Beinecke Library, and is a 2022-23 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She is working on her second book, about Gertrude Stein.