Country life in Zakopane, Poland 1936

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. Scenes of country life in Zakopane, Poland, staged for the camera. Peasants cutting bread and vegetables, interior of a house, woman cooking, weaving, man enters the house and makes the sign of the cross, all are in traditional folk dress. VS, inside a church, CUs of icons. The subject shifts to a different scene: MLS, following a man in the woods, out to hunt birds with his rifle over his shoulder, camera pans up to bird's nest. A woman meets him under the tree- the man talks to her about a gun as they sit on a bench under a tree, there is a religious icon hanging on the tree. The couple frolick in the countryside. This is listed by Julien Bryan as "Estate in winter, man and wife with dog and gun."