San Francisco Film Society honors film preservationist Lenny Borger.
Lenny Borger avers that when he gets interested in something, he goes all the way. There is no better example of that than “Monte-Cristo,” Henri Fescourt’s 1929 silent epic that will screen as part of the festivities when Borger receives the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Mel Novikoff Award on Sunday, May 3.
For 12 years, Borger was a Variety critic. He translates and subtitles French films, work that has included Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” Jules Dassin’s “Rififi” and Jean Renoir’s “La Grande Illusion.” He is also a kind of cinema detective, searching for films thought to be lost. “Monte-Cristo” is among those finds.
“I didn’t choose it. It chose me,” Borger says of the film he selected to screen at SFIFF. “It’s a film I’d seen in my travels in 1982 in Prague. I was traveling to look at old films. I spent three days looking at prints, and they had this very incomplete print of ‘Monte-Cristo’ that I looked at. I was dazzled by it, but it was only half of the film. I started looking again and found another print in Moscow, which was a French print as opposed to a Czech print. This other print ... had been stolen during the war by the Germans.
“So there were two prints that could be used for the restoration. As it turns out, the Czechs didn’t want to play along with me, and the Rus- sians weren’t very interested … I finally got my way and Arte — the cultural channel here in France and Germany — they came to me and said, ‘We want to do a restoration of the film.’ This was in 1999. So we did it. It took a long time. I was appointed a historical adviser, which I was, but I actually found all the materials that were available.
“We had four different prints, which is really a lot. In the end, we’re not missing really anything. There are maybe a couple of shots missing at the beginning of the film. I’m looking at it now. I’m looking at the old material that we worked with before and I say, ‘Hey, there’s a shot missing here.’ This is where you get really crazy, you know. ‘Hey, we’ve got to find a missing shot here, yeah!’ It goes on and on.”
Borger’s life might have been very different had it not been for Jacques Brel. The Brooklyn native became enthralled with the French singer-songwriter in the late 1960s after seeing “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Living in Paris” at the Village Gate. On a trip to Paris, he bought records, sheet music and books of Brel’s music and taught himself French so that he could translate the songs. A graduate student in theater, he went back to Paris in 1975, where the theater people he met there told him to come back and stay in touch.
In 1977, he took them up on it, moving to Paris for good. It was hard for an American to get working papers in France then, but he gained solid ground when he got the job at Variety. Three years later, Bertrand Tavernier hired him to do the English translation and subtitling of “A Week’s Vacation,” and a second career was born. French film cinephiles have taken pleasure in Borger’s work for decades.
It was another Mel Novikoff awardee, 2007 recipient Kevin Brownlow, who piqued Borger’s interest in lost films. The British film historian and filmmaker was in Paris working on the restoration of Abel Gance’s 1927 epic “Napoleon” in the late 1970s, and he and Borger became friends. Brownlow would invite Borger over to watch 9.5mm films — a home-movie format — that Borger describes as Reader’s Digest editions for the way the films were condensed. Movies that were once six or seven reels were whittled down to three.
“Kevin would show me these films and I would say, ‘These are fabulous. Where did they come from?’ He would say, ‘I don’t know. These are all that remain.’ ”
Intrigued, Borger began looking for one in particular, a 1928 French film “The Chess Player.” He discovered that an archive in East Berlin had a copy, and so off he went to look at it.
“It was missing the first reel, but it was in beautiful shape otherwise,” Borger says. “As it turned out, the film was from the original nitrate negative. I called Kevin and I said, ‘I’ve seen the film. It’s fabulous.’ The French weren’t interested, so he brought the film to the BFI and they did the restoration. So that’s what basically got me off on these rare, rare, rare films.
“Basically, Eastern Europe has the best collections, because they ended up being the end of the distribution chain. They just put them on the shelf. It’s just incredible.”
Borger remembers when he was still in New York, going to graduate school at night and going to movies during the day. He has never been to San Francisco before, and so never experienced a Mel Novikoff repertory theater, but he haunted their East Coast equivalents, especially the Bleecker Street and Carnegie Hall Cinemas. The prints, for the most part, weren’t very good, but the double bills provided a fine education.
“My first passion was Kurosawa. My second passion was Keaton,” Borger says, adding that Chabrol, the Dardenne brothers and other French directors are also part of his personal canon. “I’m a classical man, so I like classical cinema.”
Borger’s own work has added to that cinema. Of his subtitling work, he is proud that he is the first person to translate the song in “La Grande Illusion” into English and of standing his ground with Dassin in translating slang in “Rififi” when the director told him he shouldn’t. Among his discoveries in his sleuthing through archives, “Monte-Cristo” is a favorite.
“It’s a wonderful film, lavish,” Borger says. “In the sense of popular cinema, it’s very impressive. The film is sumptuous. The acting is terrific. What else can I say? It’s a good movie. Go see it.
“I want to finish the restoration, because I want to find those missing shots,” he adds. “That’s crazy me.”