Julien Hequembourg Bryan (1899-1974) was an American documentarian and filmmaker. Bryan traveled widely taking 35mm film that he sold to motion picture companies. In the 1930s, he conducted extensive lecture tours, during which he showed film footage he shot in the former USSR. Between 1935 and 1938, he captured unique records of ordinary people and life in Nazi Germany and in Poland, including Jewish areas of Warsaw and Krakow and anti-Jewish signs in Germany. His footage appeared in March of Time theatrical newsreels. His photographs appeared in Life Magazine. He was in Warsaw in September 1939 when Germany invaded and remained throughout the German siege of the city, photographing and filming what would become America's first cinematic glimpse of the start of WWII. He recorded this experience in both the book Siege (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1940) and the short film Siege (RKO Radio Pictures, 1940) nominated for an Academy Award in 1940. In 1946, Bryan photographed the efforts of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency in postwar Europe.
Detailed preservation notes from the film lab are available in Film and Video department files. Additional photographs are available in the USHMM Photo Archives.
The site of a downed plane-wreckage is visible on the hillside, where one Polish soldier is showing the journalist something that came from this plane, another Polish soldier is climbing down the hill to join them. 01:01:53:14 CU: journalist and Polish soldier, soldier demonstrates how one of the guns on the plane would have worked. More CUs of this wreckage, and cleanup, the camera pans from the site of the downed plane to the surrounding buildings that look almost brand new (this location may be one of the outlying suburbs of Warsaw that Julien Bryan refers to in his book"Sieg"). The men hold up the parachute from the plane that has been torn to shreds. Camera pans up to reveal buildings completely intact around this crash site, the men point up toward the sky to demonstrate the direction of the air attack. More wreckage and large artillery casings at 01:03:02:07. Several CUs of destroyed pieces of equipment being inspected by the group of men, a CU of a piece of cloth from the parachute seen earlier in this sequence at 01:03:07:28: revealing some marking and possibly a date of manufacture- difficult to make this out very well on screen. 01:03:17:07: Several residents of the neighborhood come out to look at the wreckage: men, women and children survey the scene now along with the soldiers. VS, at various angles. The residents then go back to their homes.
German siege of Warsaw, Poland, Sept. 1939