Lenny Borger, who served as Variety‘s Paris correspondent and film reviewer throughout the 1980s and who championed French cinema for decades as a researcher and subtitle expert for numerous films including Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” died Dec. 23 in Paris. He was 73.
Producer Serge Bromberg reported that he died after a long illness.
Borger was raised in Brooklyn, and moved to Paris in 1977 to work on his doctoral thesis. Abandoning his academic work, he began covering the French film scene for Variety and served as a correspondent and film reviewer from 1978 to 1990.
During that time he also began working on providing the English subtitles for French films, and Bertrand Tavernier gave him his first subtitling job for the 1980 “A Week’s Vacation.”
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Film critic and Amazon executive Scott Foundas called Borger “a kind of medium, channeling the linguistic spirit of a given film and making it live anew for English-speaking audiences the world over.”
Borger created entirely new or extensively revised subtitles for films by directors including Jean Renoir (“Grand Illusion”) and Jean-Luc Godard (“Breathless,” “Contempt,” “Une femme est une femme”), Jules Dassin (“Rififi”) and Jean-Pierre Melville (“Army of Shadows,” “Le Doulos”).
He was instrumental in unearthing rare and missing French films, and discovered the nitrate camera negative of Raymond Bernard’s “The Chess Player,” which he found in the East German Film Archives after it had been hidden by the Nazi occupiers of France. In Prague, he uncovered Czech distribution prints of Henri Fescourt’s “Monte-Cristo.”
In demand as a French film scholar and historian, he programmed rare French films for Italy’s Pordenone Silent Film Festival and co-curated a retrospective on Julien Duvivier for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 2015, he received the Jean Mitry Award from Pordenone and the Mel Novikoff Award for enhancing the appreciation of world cinema from the San Francisco Film Festival.
“The work of interpreting dialogue for subtitles is a critical but unexamined art that can have a huge impact on an audience’s appreciation of a film,” said Rachel Rosen, San Francisco Film Society’s director of programming. “Lenny Borger’s stellar work making French cinema come to life for English-speaking audiences and his passion for bringing lost classics back to the screen make him a true behind-the-scenes hero of world cinema.”