Modern Poland before World War II

English intertitles. Film taken prewar. Bridge. City streets and important buildings in Warsaw. A modern country: pedestrians reading newspapers, posters advertising arts and culture, vendors, trams, tall buildings, man with balloons and schoolchildren, storefronts. Cherished old quarters of Poland with ornate signs. Marketplaces - women selling flowers. City parks - women with baby carriages, CUs. High-rise apartment buildings and other modern housing structures. Jewish quarter, including arched street made famous by Roman Vishniac, geese transported in a wooden cart, the market in Krakow, Finkelstein shop and its owners, two religious Jews gesticulating in the street, and teenage students. A zinc refinery - factory and workers, zinc plates created and moved. Private residences in the mountains of Poland - wealthy couple and dog. Peasant workers with dogs and cows. A farm village, horses generate electricity for cutting hay. Peasant family - INTs of home, cooking, eating bread. Woman weaving. Livestock and farmers. CU, village children in school in southeastern Poland, playing ball outdoors, toddlers in kindergarten coloring, with abacus, learning grammar. Children weaving in the classroom, CUs. Boys engage in wood carving and sculpture in the classroom. Gdynia port with ships docked to export coal and lumber. Loading barges. Lumber yard. Railway, train, train driver. 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.