Women working at sewing machines; fashion
Creator(s)
- Sam Bryan and International Film Foundation
- Julien H. Bryan (Camera Operator)
Biographical History
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.
Scope and Content
INT, women sitting at tables and sewing clothing in a large room. A woman walks through the room with two shirts. A woman stands in front of a mirror in a dress that a seamstress is adjusting and pinning. CU, book of fashion. A designer sketches a dress. CU, Singer sewing machine. Camera pans over a city street in Russia, closes in on a sign on a building (in Cyrillic). INT, large group of women sitting around a table. Garments hang and rotate from mirror panels on a wall. CU, high heels as the camera pans up the body of a woman trying on a dress. INTs, women work at sewing machines. CU, fashion magazines. SEQ: Women in fashionable dresses walk down stairs and model for a small group of people. EXT, beauty parlor. INT, room of people being groomed. Wall covered in pictures of Joseph Stalin. In staff lounge, men play games, look at books, read newspaper. More grooming/setting hair.
Note(s)
See Stories 4519 and 4521 for similar footage. Date note: Film contains two pieces of film with varying date codes indicating the years 1935 and 1938. Transferred at 24 FPS Additional photographs are available in the USHMM Photo Archives.
Subjects
- HUMAN HAIR
- CLOTHES
- SOVIET UNION
- WOMEN
- STALIN, JOSEPH
- BRYAN, JULIEN
- SEWING
Places
- , Soviet Union
Genre
- Unedited.
- Film