Against the Storm: Herbert Kline in a Darkened Europe (Crisis: A Film of The Nazi Way / Lights Out in Europe)

Herbert Kline made his breakthrough documentary Crisis as the storm clouds of impending war gathered over Europe in 1938. The film, which captures with evocative camerawork and ominous clarity the lead-up to the occupation of Czechoslovakia, was shot at great personal risk to Kline and his crew members. Kline, 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 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 documentaries of this kind ever made, and a fascinating historical and cinematic document.In 1940, one year after filming the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Herbert Kline and his team traveled to Warsaw and England to pursue and document the feared invasion of Poland.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.