Detailed preservation notes from the film lab are available in Film and Video department files. Additional photographs are available in the USHMM Photo Archives.
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.
Katowice, Poland, 1936. CU, worker takes off his mask as he exits the zinc refinery. MLS, camera pans down the refinery smokestack to reveal the entire refinery in the valley, full pan of the valley, and then back into the mine, miners hacking away at the rocks with pick axes. Shots of bubbling molten ore at 01:01:55:00. The workers leave the refinery, and head off to the church. More shots inside the mine, the cars full of zinc ore, etc. VS of the women sorting the good pieces from the bad. EXT, the miners emerge from the mine, head into another building at the refinery. 01:04:54:00 Workers leave the factory on their bikes; large engines turn inside the factory. 01:06:30:00 changes to scenes of the burning embers of the furnace: iris shots. A worker counts the smelting ovens/jets.
Factory scenes, Katowice, Poland 1936