The silent film, with English title cards, is primarily noted for its handling of the contentious issue of interracial relationships, using avant-garde experimental film-making techniques, and is today very much part of the curriculum[where?]
In 2010, the film was released with a soundtrack composed by Mallory Johns, performed by the Southern Connecticut State University Creative Music Orchestra.
The story is based in a guesthouse occupied by a pair of liberal, hedonistic young people sympathetic to the emerging black American culture.
In Borderline, he uses avant-garde, experimental film-making techniques, blending Eisenstein’s montage innovation and Pabst’s psycho-analytical approach, to identify the emotional and psychological states of the film’s characters.
[2] "Judged on its own merits, Borderline is a ground-breaking work, dealing as it does with issues of race and sexuality at a time when such subject matter was still largely taboo and had only been previously tackled cinematically through oblique inference".
At the time of its release, Borderline was a film that confused and bewildered critics leading Clive MacManus of the London Evening Standard to advise Macpherson "to spend a year in a commercial studio" before attempting something as difficult again.