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.
MS, Julien Bryan and nurses talking in the hospital. CU of one of the nurses as she explains the situation to Bryan. MCU of four men at the hospital, the one with glasses is a German prisoner, who is being cared for by the Poles. 01:10:05:25 A young priest is present as well. CU of the German soldier getting his hair cut, another German prisoner (with a Hitler-style mustache) is smoking and talking to a Polish officer as a doctor looks on. Some of the CUs of the Germans are quite out of focus, comes back into focus- the priest spends some time smoking and talking to the German soldiers followed by a series of CUs of the wounded men. 01:11:35:14: Cut back to wounded in their hospital beds.
German siege of Warsaw, Poland 1939