Lenny Borger passed away December 23, 2024. Born in Brooklyn in 1951, a lover of French culture, Lenny moved to Paris in 1978. He worked as a journalist for Variety until the early 1990s. He also worked in the interest of silent cinema, collecting testimonials, books and archives, correspondence and photographs, and searching for prints in film libraries. As a film historian, he contributed to the restoration of several films, prompting, for example, the restoration of Les Misérables (both versions of Fescourt and Raymond Bernard) and that of Henri Fescourt’s Monte Cristo.
Passionate about theater, musicals and cinema, Lenny authored numerous English subtitles for French films. His translations range from Bertrand Tavernier (Une semaine de vacances) and Jean-Luc Godard (Une femme est une femme) to the filmmakers of the 1930s-1960s, including Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, Jules Dassin and Julien Duvivier (15 titles by this filmmaker!), as well as Patrice Chéreau, Claude Chabrol and Claude Sautet. One of his latest translations is of the intertitles for La Roue (the long version, 2016, including the translation of Gance’s “medieval” poem !). This activity enabled various catalogs, such as SND, Criterion, Lobster, Pathé and the Pathé Foundation, to benefit from the knowledge he was always generous with. Recipient of unpublished archives, Lenny also helped several students.
In 2015, Lenny Borger received the Mel Novikoff Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and the Jean Mitry Prize at the Giornate del cinema muto (Pordenone) that same year.
He passed on and shared his passion, archives and knowledge with many of us, always with his usual finesse, generosity and humor. His archives have been housed at the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, where they are regularly consulted.
Last but not least, Lenny was a great connoisseur of Russian silent cinema: a posthumous work, Ivan, Boris, Alexandre et nous – Les émigrés russes du cinéma français (1920-1939), co-written with Françoise Navailh, will be published in October 2025 by Editions du 81.
—Priska Morrissey and Stéphanie Salmon