Economic recovery activities in Europe

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. The Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) was a U.S. government agency set up in 1948 to administer the European recovery program (Marshall Plan). EXT building with several narrow smokestacks. CU man. Row of bicycles and motorcycles under a shelter, man rides a bicycle away. Woman leans out a window, speaking. Cycling down different streets. INT men enter a room full of large stacks of wound wire. Man walks across factory floor. Upside down slate reads “DAY 28 INT 1 ECA.” Two men carefully lower a large spool of wire onto something. Damaged brick building. Ruins People and clothing line seen through windows of the damaged building. Men rebuild road, rock-filled street. Men on scaffolding. Streets, carts passing. Construction. Man on ground hoists materials to men and women on scaffolding. Woman shovels sand into a cement mixer. More new buildings under construction.