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 bombed out Catholic Hospital of the Transfiguration, one of Warsaw's largest hospitals. A nurse and doctor make their way through a destroyed ward full of empty beds. Catholic statuary in the hospital, CUs of beds filled with rubble, a Virgin Mary statue on a bed, a palm tree. MCU of Julien Bryan speaking with one of the nurses at the hospital. 01:06:05 Quick shot of the destruction at the American Consular office in Warsaw. Shots of another hospital with a makeshift maternity ward in the cellar hallway. VS of the new mothers and newborns. CU, a newborn's head is bandaged. More shots of babies born around the time of the siege, including a shot of twin boys. 01:06:42 INT of Eastman Kodak Laboratory in Warsaw, two lab workers with 16mm film in hand, trying to clean the mess after it was bombed. Bryan rushed to this lab each day he was in Warsaw to immediately process his film of the German attack on the city. Bryan writes in his book"Sieg" that one processing tank exploded, and luckily, his film was not in that tank.
Catholic hospital in Warsaw destroyed during the German siege, 1939