Lenny Borger, Former Variety Paris Correspondent and Longtime Champion of French Film, Dies at 73
variety.comPat Saperstein Deputy Editor 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.” 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”).
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