AGAINST THE STORM: HERBERT KLINE IN A DARKENED EUROPE (1939-1940)

 A pair of new restorations of decisive and timely documentaries by filmmaker Herbert Kline from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. Crisis: A Film of “The Nazi Way” and Lights Out in Europe, both previously unavailable, now beautifully restored by MoMA, will be available in a brand-new Blu-ray Disc edition, with generous underwriting and funding from Sunrise Foundation for Education and the Arts. The National Center for Jewish Film served as fiscal sponsor.

Herbert Kline made his breakthrough documentary Crisis: A Film of “The Nazi Way” as the storm clouds of impending war gathered over Europe in 1938. Narrated by illustrious American stage, film, and television actor, Leif Erickson, the film, which captures with evocative camerawork and ominous clarity the lead-up to the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, was shot at great personal risk to Kline and his crew members. Kline, a Jew born in Chicago and raised in Iowa, was in his late 20s when he began filming in the Sudeten region bordering Germany, and took on the hair-raising task of not only passing as a Nazi sympathizer in order to complete the project, but also smuggling the footage out of the Prague airport past Gestapo guards. The result is one of the first anti-Hitler documentaries ever made, and a fascinating historical and cinematic document.

In 1940, one year after filming the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Hitler’s forces, Herbert Kline and his team traveled to Warsaw and England to pursue and document the feared Nazi invasion of Poland. Narrated by Academy Award winning actor, Fredric March, the surviving recordings of these life threatening events would serve as evidence of the outbreak of the Second World War, bringing about one of the first completed and distributed documentaries on one of the most destructive international conflicts in history; Lights Out in Europe.