Georgia, Caucasus Mountains, circa 1933

Peasants baking bread, harvesting grain, going about their daily lives in this rural, mountainous region. This footage is stunning. Julien Bryan himself is featured in this footage. He traveled at this time with the noted anthropologist Maurice Hindus and a group of Princeton University students on a journey through Russian villages. Several of the students can also be seen in this sequence. They traveled with local guides, with horses and mules through the mountains. VS of their local guides, the mountains, children and women in the villages, sifting grain and baking flatbread, local men herding goats on the mountainside. Julien Bryan and one of the locals try to learn each other's language by writing down words and letters and exchanging pieces of paper. VS, beginning with a MCU of a pig and her suckling young. Good views of the traditional dwellings that are built into the mountainside, getting water at the local well. The sequence ends on a charming scene of two young boys eating fresh picked cherries from their baskets, their mouths are covered with cherry juice, as they continue to eat the fruit and smile for the camera. ** This reel has an incorrect title, because the can for this reel was mislabeled; this is actually footage from the early 1930s, shot in Georgia, in the Caucasus Mountains. 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.