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.
LS, snow covered ground: statue of a man wielding a sword in a square in Warsaw, Poland. Buildings all around the statue are destroyed. MLS three young children in the street, walking toward the camera, they smile, continue walking until they are out of frame, then the camera captures them from behind, continuing their walk through the barren streets of the destroyed city of Warsaw. Cut to MLS, a man walking alone through the same deserted area, three men on a cart going down this same street- one man pedals the cart, two are in it. Soldiers in military supply trucks moving slowly through the streets of Warsaw- they are either Polish or Russian army. The trucks carry wooden coffins with wreaths on top of them- their fallen comrades. Each truck seems to have three coffins stacked in it. MS of a woman selling flowers on the street; LS of a destroyed building- it looks as though it may be one of the same ones that Bryan filmed in 1939. The shot lasts several seconds, then switches at 01:10:30:14 to a MS of a memorial covered in snow, wreaths, names, crosses, carnations, are all peaking out of the snow. 01:11:07:00 CU, shot from low angle of a destroyed church, followed by beautiful shots of two little girls walking hand in hand through the destroyed streets of Warsaw, covered in snow. The girls walk away from the camera, with their backs to the viewer
Scenes of destruction in Warsaw, Poland 1946