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.
Austrian footage, c. 1948 in Linz, a factory town where several DPs were put to work and began rehabilitation postwar. Scene of men leaving the factory on bikes, some women, some children, and several Austrians (non DPs) are in the group as well. Another group of men walking from the factory, at the gate, exiting the factory grounds, there is a guard who checks them as they exit. Truckloads of workers also exit the factory- they are all seated in open military style supply trucks.VS, EXTs the factory in Linz, smoke stacks, etc. INT of the factory: men at work, VS. A rail car pulls up to the station. Metal is being cast, shots of the molten metal. VS, barges on a river, train heading toward the camera, then moving away from camera, factory sequence and pan of Austrian hillside.
Linz, Austria, 1948