Postwar conditions of housing and YMCAs in Europe and the Far East
Creator(s)
- Sam Bryan and International Film Foundation
- Sam Bryan and International Film Foundation (Producer)
- Julien H. Bryan (Producer)
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
Credits. EXT, bridges in San Francisco and Germany. Bridges at war - soldiers and tanks, bombings. Repaired bridge in Manila in October 1946. Views of damage to buildings in Manila. Children and young people in Manila, food shortages. YMCA services. 01:06:36 Boys club meeting of the YMCA outdoors in Manila. Baseball game. Damaged Y building. INTs, woman cooking in her home; her family eats. Student accommodations. Vocational training - repairing an automobile. Boxing match. Amateur night (musical performance). 01:09:55 Cathedral in Prague. City scenes, some buildings with damage. Two men enter the YMCA building. Boys swimming in pool and playing basketball. Prison. INTs, guillotine. CU, Miloslav Kohac (?), a YMCA staff member and prisoner during World War II. He scrubs the floor. 01:12:55 HAS, Shanghai city in 1947. EXT and INT YMCA buildings. Training men with new vocations in a woodshop. Other YMCAs in China that were destroyed. Children eating at daycare centers and preschool classrooms. 01:14:43 Pile of rubble in Warsaw, Poland, children at play. YMCA building, children enter and play games. Adults eating in a cafe. Boxes of UNRRA supplies are lifted off a ship and distributed. Map animation displaying the locations of damaged YMCAs in need of repairs or young people in need of rehabilitation. Narrator explains the importance of fundraising for the World Youth Fund to help Y staff or others in need in Poland, Philippines, China, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere, against a landscape of shots of people seen earlier in the film production.
Note(s)
Credits: A Julien Bryan IFF Presentation, written by Basil Beyea, narrated by Arnold Moss, Edited by Joseph E. Dushock and Edward H. Powick. More credits for the Far Eastern Expedition crew and the European Expedition crew. Photographed by three camera crews in the Philippines, Czechoslovakia, China, and Poland.
The film's purpose is to "acquaint people with the war-created needs of overseas Ys" and was screened in the United States at several YMCAs in support of their World Youth Fund Campaign in 1947. According to a news report, "The Fund has two broad aims: first, to help lead the young people of war-devastated countries back into paths of moral decency and Christian living; and second, to help restore certain of the key facilities of the YMCA in places that suffered most. The cost of this program is easily understood in view of the fact that 105 overseas buildings have been utterly or partly destroyed, and that hundreds of lay and staff leaders are ill-clad, undernourished and badly housed, but working as they have never worked before. The World Youth Fund will give tools to the empty-handed, and reasonable comforts to men who for more than seven years have lived in hardships and the shadow of death."
Subjects
- CHINA
- FOOD
- CIVILIANS
- HOUSES
- DESTRUCTION
- POLAND
- RUINS
- BRIDGES
- CHILDREN
- UNIVERSITIES
- SPORTS/GAMES
- VILLAGES
- POSTWAR
- UNRRA
- BOATS
- RHINE RIVER
- CHURCHES
- BRYAN, JULIEN
- YMCA
- CLOTHES
Places
- Manila, Philippines
- Prague, Czechoslovakia
- San Francisco, CA, United States
- , China
- Shanghai, China
- Warsaw, Poland
Genre
- Documentary.
- Film