NFR Project: 'Siege' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘Siege’

Dir: Julien Bryan

Scr: Julien Bryan

Pho: Julien Bryan

Ed: Frederick Ullman Jr., Frank Donovan

Premiere: 1940

10 min.

This essential viewing is bone-chilling. On September 7, 1939, Julien Hequembourg Bryan was the only neutral photographer to shoot film of the infamous Siege of Warsaw (Sept. 1 – Oct. 1, 1939) by the Nazi regime. This is a compassionate and sorrowful record of the tragedies of war.

He filmed and photographed in central Europe during the years 1935 to 1939. He had previously made the prescient short documentary Inside Nazi Germany, outlining the dangers of Hitler’s regime, in 1938. Bryan arrived in Warsaw on the 7^th, carrying a still camera, a film camera, and 6,000 feet of film. Until September 21 he lived in Warsaw, documenting the brutal facts about the attack of a fascist military machine against a largely defenseless civilian population. He shot 5,000 of it.

He smuggled the photos and pictures out, wrapping some of the film around his torso, on Sept. 12.

The resulting 10-minute grim masterpiece gives us all the consequences of a city’s defense against its attackers. Bryan himself narrates the footage, noting that conditions were far worse than those articulated in the major media at the time. He finds barricades, soldiers in the streets, wholesale destruction of property, breadlines . . . and the bodies of the dead, the faces of the suffering. He tracks refugees, records the incessant air raids. He films blocks of apartments in flame, by night, lighting up the city for another round of bombers.

Bryan’s compassionate gaze surveys the ruins of hospitals, then moves to the plight of women with newborns, and casts lingering looks on a ruined church. This is advocacy journalism, to be sure. It is clear where Bryan’s sentiments lie. He gives us a montage of the despairing faces of the besieged. Bryan concludes his narrative by stating, “May God have mercy on them.”

The film is candid. A viewer is faced with the unpalatable, improbable horrors of war and carnage; Bryan was getting the message out. The film was nominated for an Oscar in 1941. It stands as an indictment of armed aggression.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse.