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 first days of September 1939, Warsaw, Poland under siege: MCU of German soldiers who are prisoners of the Poles, talking, smoking, cutting one cuts another's hair. It is believed that the soldier who is seated in the shot is a German Jewish soldier, according to Julien Bryan's accounts of this footage. This is NOT a confirmed fact. VS of destruction; people climbing over rubble, looking for their belongings that may remain in the wreckage of their homes. A young boy with a pet canary in a cage that survived the bombings. CUs of the dead and wounded. A woman plants a memorial of branches and twigs at a makeshift grave. LS of a plaza in Warsaw, two men with armbands walk across the plaza.VS of the streets, people gathering in doorways, talking to each other, unsure of what will happen next. 01:10:53:16: children and women gathered in a doorway, quick cut to more rubble, several quick shots of refugees looking bewildered; CU of an overturned pushcart; civilians talk and point nervously with soldiers; citizens brigades in the street standing guard;CUs of posters, anti-German propaganda. A very quick shot of refugees walking toward a large municipal building with all of their bundles, civic buildings were now serving as shelters. LS of citizen soldiers; people filing into a large building; VS from a rooftop to the street below: busy street, Red Cross bus drives down the tram tracks in the middle of the street; young boy handing out leaflets; streams of men with their belongings. 01:13:15:22 people in the streets looking nervously over their shoulders as they go about their daily tasks worrying when the next attack will come. 01:13:25: INT, church sequence: church in Warsaw that has been damaged by German bombs (under-cranked, low light).01:13:51:15: Sandbagged corner building in Warsaw. MS, women, children, and soldier on the street, a mother fixes her child's hair; LS, from rooftop of a large bomb induced crater. VS in and around the crater that is surrounded by people and soldiers surveying the damage.
German siege of Warsaw, Sept. 1939