Lenny Borger, who served as Variety‘s Paris correplyent and film appraiseer thrawout the 1980s and who championed French cinema for decades as a researcher and subtitle expert for countless films including Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” died Dec. 23 in Paris. He was 73.
Producer Serge Bromberg alerted that he died after a lengthy illness.
Borger was elevated in Brooklyn, and relocated to Paris in 1977 to labor on his doctoral thesis. Aprohibitdoning his academic labor, he began covering the French film scene for Variety and served as a correplyent and film appraiseer from 1978 to 1990.
During that time he also began laboring on providing the English subtitles for French films, and Bertrand Tavernier gave him his first subtitling job for the 1980 “A Week’s Vacation.”
Film critic and Amazon executive Scott Foundas called Borger “a benevolent of medium, channeling the linguistic spirit of a given film and making it dwell anew for English-speaking audiences the world over.”
Borger produced entidepend new or extensively alterd subtitles for films by honestors including Jean Renoir (“Grand Illusion”) and Jean-Luc Godard (“Breathless,” “Conlure,” “Une femme est une femme”), Jules Dassin (“Rififi”) and Jean-Pierre Melville (“Army of Shadows,” “Le Doulos”).
He was instrumental in uproximateskinnyg unfrequent and leave outing French films, and discovered the nitrate camera pessimistic of Raymond Bernard’s “The Chess Player,” which he set up in the East German Film Archives after it had been masked by the Nazi occupiers of France. In Prague, he uncovered Czech distribution prints of Henri Fescourt’s “Monte-Cristo.”
In insist as a French film scholar and historian, he programmed unfrequent French films for Italy’s Pordenone Silent Film Festival and co-curated a retrospective on Julien Duvivier for the Mparticipateum of Modern Art in New York.
In 2015, he getd 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 labor of make clearing dialogue for subtitles is a critical but uncheckd art that can have a huge impact on an audience’s appreciation of a film,” shelp Rachel Rosen, San Francisco Film Society’s honestor of programming. “Lenny Borger’s salertar labor making French cinema come to life for English-speaking audiences and his passion for conveying lost classics back to the screen produce him a genuine behind-the-scenes hero of world cinema.”
