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CHAPTER 2

Solemn Venues

War Trauma and the Expanding Nontheatrical Realm

In 1943, the Army psychiatrist George S. Goldman was placed on full-time duty to develop a “general program” of “psychiatric films”—original documentaries that could “contribute to mental health” by “removing some of the mystery connected with psychiatry and by properly explaining many of the misconceptions commonly connected with this specialty.”¹ The hope was that such films would not only help to rehabilitate “the great number of seriously sick returnees” but also to prevent future psychiatric casualties, in the process solidifying the military’s reputation as a “healthful” set of institutions—or, at the very least, as eminently capable of providing effective psychiatric treatment for those in need.² Because the so-called “neuropsychiatric problem” had become “overwhelmingly large,” threatening to “amount to the largest medical-social problem this country [had] ever faced,” documentary film was deemed necessary as a flexible instrument of education, rehabilitation, and public relations. The genre was thus an ideal component of “a program of well directed, constructive publicity”—a means of “acquainting [Americans] factually with the problem involved.”³ Because all of the resulting films dealt, in some fashion, with “death and the fear of death,” they were deemed widely—potentially “universally”—relevant, particularly during the nuclear age.⁴ Their “focus is on the wartime patient,” noted a 1953 manual, “but the psychodynamics portrayed are generally applicable,” lending these films a “high instructional value and motivating power” for the population at large.⁵ The postwar passage of the National Mental Health Act (1946) and the emergence of a bona fide mental health movement seemed to confirm this power, as government and civilian agencies continued to find new uses for “old” documentaries.

During and after the war, the military sought to formalize and expand the links between cinema and the social sciences, a process that required the close participation of psychological experts. Established in 1942, the Psychological Test Film Unit of the Army Air Forces Aviation Psychology Program, which studied cinema’s effects on audiences, was maintained until well into the postwar period. Eventually, the Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit, based in Culver City, would coordinate its production activities with the Psychological Test Film Unit, based in Santa Ana. Under the direction of psychologist James J. Gibson, whose celebrated interest in visual perception hardly precluded considerations of war trauma and psychotherapy, the latter would help solidify connections between military filmmaking and psychological research, producing twenty-two “psychological test films” by 1946.⁶

While these “interactive” works—“tests on film,” which included such titles as Identification of Velocity Test and Aircraft Recognition Proficiency Exam—were hardly the kinds of “therapeutic documentaries” that the Army and the Navy were producing at the time, they were used to identify “neurotic factors,” and their verifiable pedagogic effects helped confirm cinema’s value as a psychological and psychoanalytic tool in the military.⁷ Furthermore, Gibson’s films were commonly screened for newly admitted psychiatric patients, not only gauging the aptitude and intelligence of the recently traumatized but also serving as crucial diagnostic tools, “triggering” telling responses.⁸ With Gibson getting such noteworthy results with his psychological test films, others—including psychiatrists—were encouraged to pursue their own cinematic experiments, becoming amateur filmmakers even while functioning as medical professionals. Adopting a Freudian metaphor, Charles Tepperman considers the extent to which amateur films “represent a working through of the relationship between creativity and technology, between individual and collective experience, and between local contingencies and the commercial aesthetics of mass media.”⁹ Such was the essence of psychiatry’s embrace of filmmaking amid the seismic transformations of the 1940s, as “total war” raised new questions about the profession’s obligation both to institutions like the Army and the Navy and to society as a whole.

TRAUMATIC ANTECEDENTS

“I know one guy from the last World War. He was shell-shocked—people made fun of him. That made me mad. Nice guy, but he’s down in the dumps. He didn’t care for nothing. Used to tell me about the other war. Nice guy. I don’t want to be that way myself. I want to go home, but I don’t want to be like that guy. He was dirty—nice guy, though. No one could understand. They didn’t know that the guy was shell-shocked. They laughed at him and poked fun at him. And I used to beat hell out of the kids—nice guy. I don’t want to go home like that, Captain. I want to be well and be able to have a family.”

—Army corporal, 25, speaking under the influence of sodium pentothal in a VA hospital at the end of World War II¹⁰

World War I and the interwar period witnessed numerous private and state-sponsored efforts to render cinema useful to the treatment of war trauma. Beginning in 1915, French and British physicians screened Charlie Chaplin films in an attempt to restore speech in soldiers rendered mute by the horrors of combat, while Red Cross and, increasingly, YMCA centers at or near the front lines frequently served as “therapeutic” exhibition sites.¹¹ Catalyzed by George Eastman in the early 1920s, the “Hospital Happiness Movement” further touted film’s restorative potential, as the Eastman Kodak Company’s Medical Division began advertising films, projectors, and screens to hospital administrators across the United States.¹² The company’s careful cultivation of the hospital as a source of revenue was coincident with its canny transformation of the classroom into an exhibition space of equal if not greater profitability.¹³

That nontheatrical film was big business by the early 1920s, thanks in large part to the introduction of nonflammable 16mm stock, helps explain the zeal with which so many key players pursued the perpetual circulation of military documentaries after World War II. Numerous companies stood to profit from this pursuit, and not merely financially. The inescapably high-minded dimensions of this activity—the moral and quasi-medical cachet conferred upon those who ensured that trauma-themed documentaries would be widely seen—represented their own form of capital, one that could empower both civic participation and the emergent practices of “corporate social responsibility” and “cause-related marketing.”

By the 1920s, profits may have motivated the uptake of “therapeutic films” by various distributors and other nontheatrical interests (including Eastern Film and the Society for Visual Education), but the Red Cross had already set several important precedents for the widespread use of films to provide “medical education.” As Jennifer Horne has shown, the Red Cross Motion Picture Bureau (1916–1922) used nontheatrical film to contribute to public health campaigns, even offering an entire film program on the physical and psychological rehabilitation of veterans.¹⁴ Distributing its own original productions along with the Army’s “hygiene films,” the Red Cross reached Rotary halls, Kiwanis clubs, churches, bus stations, and gymnasiums with privately and federally funded films about war trauma, thus providing some of the discursive and infrastructural scaffolding on which later efforts would rest.

Commercial firms quickly adopted the Red Cross’s approach, often collaborating with the government in order to make military films widely available to Americans. Between 1924 and 1939, Kodak’s Kodascope Library, a rental and purchase system for 16mm films, had contracts with the U.S. War Department that allowed it to regularly distribute short, government-sponsored documentaries to nationwide audiences for home viewing. Advertisements for Kodascope Libraries frequently touted the availability of “official United States War Department movies of the World War, filmed in action by the Signal Corps.” Additionally, so-called War Cinegraphs, two-hundred-foot one-reelers sold for $15 each, were available along with feature-length documentaries in the America Goes Over series, which consisted of “special authentic war pictures compiled and edited by military experts.”¹⁵

Nonfiction films about the traumas of World War I were also sold by individual collectors who echoed Kodak’s insistence that such films deserved to become “a permanent part of [one’s] film library.”¹⁶ As Haidee Wasson has demonstrated in her work on 16mm, Kodak and other distributors were firmly committed to circulating “shocking,” potentially traumatizing images of combat, with one advertisement going so far as to promise a “vast panorama of war,” the “stark realism” of which could be “lived” and “relived” by audiences in the home.¹⁷ Anticipating the overtly therapeutic use and reuse of films by military psychiatrists and others committed to rehabilitating battle-scarred veterans, Kodak’s promotion of combat documentaries was, in Wasson’s persuasive reading, part of a broader attempt to normalize war trauma—“a means by which the changes wrought by modern life would be made slower, safer and more easily contained.”¹⁸ Kodak, which began developing high-resolution aerial photography in 1919, thus positioned itself as more than just a facilitator of the military’s image-making capabilities, circulating nonfiction films as a means of educating as well as “soothing” Americans made anxious by the traumas of modernity.¹⁹

In many instances, what was good business for Kodak and other companies was good public relations for the military, particularly in the wake of World War I. Kodak was hardly in the habit of embracing films of which the armed forces disapproved, and its military contracts often precluded precisely this gesture.²⁰ In the late teens, however, the nontheatrical circulation of Arthur Hurst’s “imported” British documentary War Neuroses (1918), which recorded the treatment of severely “shell-shocked” patients at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley and the Seale Hayne Military Hospital in Devon, raised concerns among American military officials even as it inspired new therapeutic regimens.²¹

The use of film to directly address war trauma was plainly discouraged during the reign of such far-reaching regulatory organizations as the Community Motion Picture Bureau (headed by self-proclaimed “motion picture reformer” Warren Dunham Foster) as well as the far more familiar Committee on Public Information (CPI, also known as the Creel Committee), both of which were dedicated to censoring anything that smacked of an antiwar or anti-military stance. At the same time, however, cinema’s realist potential—including its capacity to record traumatic combat experiences—was widely celebrated in accounts of “war pictures.” Thus the difficulty of disentangling war trauma (potentially a source of negative publicity for the military) from discourses of realism (increasingly employed to tout the military’s image-making capabilities) characterized the state-sponsored development of film production, distribution, and exhibition during and in the wake of World War I.²²

These tensions between realism and public relations played out in a number of ways. With journalists routinely critiquing the capacity of visual media to “give rather too rose-colored an idea of the soldier’s daily routine,” the military was compelled to employ strategic doses of realism—often in the form of direct references to combat—in its recruitment efforts.²³ “It is a fact that the Government has nothing to conceal from any prospective applicant as to any feature of the different arms of the service,” wrote Major R. C. Croxton in 1913.²⁴ And yet the War Department objected to Vitagraph’s Lifting the Ban of Coventry (Wilfred North, 1915) on the grounds that the film, which is based on actual cases of social discrimination in the military, offered “a most unfavorable impression of the Army,” forcing the National Board of Censorship to intervene with requested cuts.²⁵ American involvement in World War I would only intensify these censorial pressures, even as it offered new opportunities for a realist portrayal of combat.

For the military itself, producing realist motion pictures without so much as alluding to war trauma proved remarkably difficult. The Army Signal Corps began making films in late 1917, at which point it was tasked with producing a “Pictorial History of the War” that would serve as both proto-documentary “record” and reliable recruitment tool.²⁶ But the CPI, with its close ties to private industry as well as its narrow conception of “acceptable propaganda,” became the sole distributing agency for Signal Corps films during World War I.²⁷ Committed to avoiding conflict with commercial film interests, the CPI’s Division of Films often handed Signal Corps “actualities” to the American Red Cross and various state councils of defense, which tended to screen them free of charge to patriotic societies, schools, and churches.²⁸ Despite the CPI’s injunctions against “demoralization,” at least one Signal Corps film produced during World War I—1918’s His Best Gift—dramatizes war trauma (in this case, combat-related blindness); its emphasis, however, is not on rehabilitation but, rather, on the need to purchase “war risk insurance.”²⁹

At the same time that the Signal Corps, in close collaboration with the CPI, was generally skirting the issue of war trauma, several commercial films were addressing it directly, if with disastrous consequences. In 1917, two pacifist films, Civilization (Thomas H. Ince, et al., 1916) and War Brides (Herbert Brenon, 1916), were banned by the Pennsylvania Board of Censors, who argued that the films “tended to discourage enlistment” by focusing on the traumatic consequences of combat.³⁰ After attending a screening of the latter film in Kansas City, Army and Navy recruiting officers asked the War Department to “suppress the picture,” citing its “disturbing” dimensions.³¹ In Civilization, all soldiers are, according to a title card, “grim specters of death”—individual agents of trauma in the age of mechanized war.

Remaining a key referent in interwar attempts to sketch the contours of trauma, World War I offered a sort of shorthand for films that sought to plumb psychological depths. Set in the war’s immediate aftermath, the Howard Hughes production The Mating Call (James Cruze, 1928) features men who confidently diagnose shell shock in veterans exhibiting any hints of emotional distress. For its part, In Paris, A.W.O.L. (Roland Reed, 1936) uses footage of World War I in order to suggest a “traumatic flashback” experienced by a convalescing veteran—an approach shared by Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 melodrama Broken Lullaby, which additionally depicts the startle response of a traumatized man who mistakes the sounds of a celebratory parade for the sounds of battle.³² Unlike Lubitsch’s film, the somewhat more disturbing In Paris, A.W.O.L. was not given a general commercial release in 1936 and was, instead, screened in special engagements organized by its sponsor, the American Legion, which hoped to raise awareness about war trauma and its lasting effects on veterans.

Hardly unique, Broken Lullaby and In Paris, A.W.O.L. were merely two among a number of trauma-themed films produced and distributed in the interwar period. These included George Cukor’s A Bill of Divorcement (1932), which explores the relationship between war trauma and other forms of mental illness, as its suffering protagonist (played by John Barrymore) reveals that his “latent insanity”—a hereditary trait that threatens to strike his daughter (played by Katharine Hepburn)—was merely “brought on by shellshock.” Stressing that war trauma, which is all too excruciating on its own, can also exacerbate preexisting conditions, A Bill of Divorcement looks forward to the military’s postwar documentary Shades of Gray (1947), which insists that combat fatigue can “inflame” inborn neuroses, as well as to the Hollywood thriller Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953), which makes an identical claim in its depiction of a Korean War veteran. Consider, as well, Franchot Tone’s performance of shell shock in John Ford’s The World Moves On (1934), in which one man’s callous comment—that “war is nature’s way of eliminating surplus people”—inspires the female protagonist, Mary (Madeleine Carroll), to offer a powerful denunciation of the military-industrial complex, which functions, in her acidulous reading, “so that the guns shan’t go hungry.” Presciently denouncing what seem to her to be welfare programs for the military, Mary goes on to declare that “war is a disease—homicidal mania, on the grand scale, brought on by fear and jealousy.” For its part, the contemporaneous mystery film Charlie Chan in Paris (Lewis Seiler, 1935) suggests the sheer intelligibility of war trauma—the production of common sense about the condition—in its depiction of criminals who disguise themselves as the same “unfortunate relic of the war,” a pitiable figure suffering from “shellshock.”

In the 1930s, the peace, isolationist, and anti-interventionist movements were united by a common commitment to raising awareness about war trauma, and individual antiwar organizations often produced their own films for distribution to schools, churches, amateur movie clubs, and fraternal organizations. These included Must War Be? (Walter Niebuhr, 1932), a production of the Peace Films Foundation that enjoyed a broad nontheatrical circulation (and was directed by the former coordinator of motion picture photography for the Signal Corps); Dealers in Death: The Story of the War Racket (Burnet Hershey, 1934), which implicates the military-industrial complex in the production of war trauma (as the narrator puts it, “Profits increased in direct proportion to the ever-growing lists of dead and wounded—stock prices and casualty lists skyrocketed together,” creating “a pagan holiday for the dealers in death”); Lives Wasted (1936), a widely screened anti-war drama produced by the New Film Group, focusing on the plight of a “crippled” and otherwise traumatized veteran living in abject poverty; and a variety of shorts and features screened through the Peace Films Caravan, whose portable 16mm projectors enabled screenings in an array of public locations, from town squares to fairgrounds.³³

Some films produced in the interwar period focus directly on war trauma and its psychological symptoms. Set during and in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the aptly titled Shock (Roy J. Pomeroy, 1934), for instance, explicitly depicts the traumatic effects of combat. The film’s opening credit sequence features several explosions, the sound of which is practically deafening and the smoke of which obscures the titles—a shock for the spectator, a sort of violation of convention that, in its own way, seeks to reproduce the intolerable experience of technological war. Shock emphasizes the sheer inevitability of war trauma, as the “tough” officer Derek Marbury (Ralph Forbes) succumbs to shell shock, which leads to amnesia. The remainder of the film is devoted to psychiatric and lay efforts to restore Marbury’s memory—efforts that eventually hinge on a therapeutic reenactment of combat.³⁴ Shock ends with Marbury, his memory restored, finally aware of the epidemic proportions of war trauma—and of the federal government’s responsibility to care for veterans. Should the government fail in this regard, Marbury and others will simply have to “march on Washington.”³⁵

When, in the 1940s, the U.S. military began producing and commissioning films about war trauma, it was partly as a form of social and political management—a means of reclaiming war trauma from antiwar filmmakers and of preventing the sort of protest movement promised in Shock and other films. With the military itself acknowledging the extent of the problem, there would perhaps be no need to march on Washington—and certainly no need to suggest that the state cruelly ignores the struggles of so many men. First, however, the matter of distribution would need to be addressed, and with it the potential scope of nontheatrical nonfiction film.

DISTRIBUTING TRAUMA

To claim that any film was “produced by the United States military,” as I do throughout this book, requires some qualification. The military was, in the 1940s, hardly a monolithic entity, and my attention to its multivalent character is in keeping with the work of scholars who insist that it was, and remains, not one institution but, rather, a network of institutions with variant relationships to—and aspirations for—cinema as a source of instruction, instrument of public relations, and agent of psychological rehabilitation.³⁶ I use the term “military documentary” to describe films produced by actual military studios (the Signal Corps Photographic Center, the Training Films and Motion Picture Branch of the Bureau of Aeronautics, the Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit) as well as by nonmilitary organizations that collaborated with the armed forces, including Hollywood studios, the U.S. Office of Education’s Division of Visual Aids for War Training, and an array of small production companies devoted to nontheatrical nonfiction film. I thus consider a film a military documentary, and refer to it as such, even if it was produced by the Jam Handy Organization or Chicago Film Studios, since the production orders frequently came directly from the armed forces, which, in many cases, oversaw production and enjoyed something like final cut. My intention is not to deny the specificity of a nonmilitary organization, subsuming it under the totalizing banner of the armed forces, but rather to foreground the diverse utility of films for a military that has long been in complex dialogue with a diversity of producers, distributors, and audiences. Contesting the naïve “paradigm of military versus society”—the familiar binaries separating martial and civil spheres—Alice Lovejoy writes of “military cinema’s close intertwining with ‘civilian’ cinema,” and her scare quotes are instructive: they point not only to the close cooperation between the state and profit-seeking producers—the public-private partnerships that make commercial filmmaking possible, particularly in the United States (albeit in ways that differ from the Czechoslovak contexts that centrally concern Lovejoy)—but also to the understudied influence of “nonfiction, short, and ‘useful’ film” on more “mainstream” fare. Lovejoy’s ironizing of “civilian” speaks to the need to revise received wisdom regarding what qualifies as state-sponsored cinema—a task taken up by political economists like Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, who have long insisted on the centrality of government support to the ever-broadening Hollywood machine.³⁷

By 1945, the armed forces were heavily involved in efforts to influence—even dictate—the dimensions of Hollywood’s fictional engagements with war trauma, often demanding a certain instructional flair and singling out erroneous and otherwise offensive representations. For example, the military’s Bureau of Public Relations cited RKO’s romantic fantasy The Enchanted Cottage (John Cromwell, 1945) as a pernicious source of misinformation—a fiction film that “presents a completely false impression of Army rehabilitation policy.”³⁸ Premised, the bureau argued, on the paranoid notion that “war-crazed” veterans were being denied the benefits of military psychiatry, the film features a battle-scarred protagonist whose recovery requires nothing short of the sheer magic of the eponymous cottage, which effects the “extraordinary transformation” of this “broken, bitter shell of a man”—a sort of psychological conversion without psychotherapy. This odious exception seemed to prove a new rule, one that would extend well into the postwar period: when it came to depicting war trauma, Hollywood’s realist techniques—the industry’s systematized production of verisimilitude—increasingly depended upon close collaboration with the military, a set of institutions that often enjoyed script approval (vetoing misleading or otherwise objectionable representations of war trauma, as in the original draft of Raymond Chandler’s screenplay for The Blue Dahlia [George Marshall, 1946]) and even dispatched officers and enlisted personnel to “play themselves” in projects deemed in need of a patina of documentary legitimacy.³⁹

Military filmmaking, whether at the Signal Corps or the Bureau of Aeronautics, was no less artisanal than the work of the Hollywood studios, which David Bordwell has described as a mode of production “in which each worker adds something distinctive to the result, and the ‘product’ is a complex blend of overlapping and crisscrossing contributions.”⁴⁰ Military documentaries rarely bear the names of directors, owing to an institutional tradition of attributing authorship to the sponsoring service branch. Many such films were made in a truly collaborative fashion, and one of my goals is to emphasize the function of military psychiatrists who participated in the filmmaking process, often directing actors and storyboarding scenes according to certain therapeutic and pedagogic objectives, their contributions scarcely recognizable to auteurist discourse. The “domain of the anonymous, the uncelebrated, and the amateur,” the nontheatrical sector was also informed by the efforts of psychiatric professionals who attempted not merely to make names for themselves but also to take their work out of the asylum (long a site of exhibition for “therapeutic film”) and place it in classrooms, churches, civic organizations, and museums.⁴¹ Military-sponsored nontheatrical film was thus a key vehicle of psychiatry’s movement “from asylum to community”—a means of transporting it from the stigmatized margins to the teeming center of everyday life in the United States.⁴²

The military, through its various branches, had multiple ways of pursuing film distribution in wartime America. The Army’s Industrial Services Division, linked as it was to the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations, maintained a commitment to the free distribution of documentaries to a vast nontheatrical audience of “managers and war workers engaged in the production of war materials.” Dubbed “incentive films,” these documentaries were hardly limited to cheerful records of industrial productivity. They included films designed to “show the realities of war”—to “bring home to American war workers and to industrial management . . . a full sense of the immediacy” of combat-related traumas. The point, as articulated by the likes of Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson and Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell, was to inspire a serious-minded dedication to one’s job (and, perhaps, to obfuscate the connections between that job and the traumas depicted in various documentaries). Incentive films, which ran the gamut from the shrill Why We Fight series to more reflective works about war trauma and psychotherapy (such as The Inside Story of Seaman Jones and Introduction to Combat Fatigue), reached an estimated six million spectators per month by the summer of 1944. Millions more were added with the increased cooperation of industrial managers, such as those in Mobile, Alabama, who screened incentive films on a nightly basis in a public park. Others, like the managers of the Glenn Martin Company, an aircraft manufacturer in Baltimore, elected to rent commercial theaters for twice-weekly screenings of Army documentaries for employees and their families.⁴³

Despite the period’s reputation for monotonous propaganda and top-down instruction in patriotic citizenship, the war years witnessed the largely nontheatrical distribution of a wide variety of military films for an equally wide variety of purposes—including, eventually, the purpose of normalizing war trauma and its state-sponsored treatment. Some of the military’s more reflexive films confirm this expansiveness: the Coast Guard’s Sunset in the Pacific (1945), for instance, proudly suggests that the institution’s documentaries “get around,” while the Army’s The Role of the Combat Cameraman (1952) similarly insists that such films “serve many important purposes,” from “visual documentation” to “intelligence work” to “emotional” rehabilitation.

Military documentaries about trauma and psychotherapy were especially welcome in American universities during and after the war. As Dana Polan has demonstrated, the study of film was a prominent, if occasionally awkward and contentious, part of university psychology departments as early as the 1920s, and this history of film’s “psychological” use in higher education would exert an appreciable influence on the wartime embrace of cinema as a therapeutic as well as pedagogic instrument. Consider, for instance, Boris Morkovin’s Auditory Visual Kinesthetic Clinic at the University of Southern California, which the comparative literature professor established in 1938, and which, during World War II, “took as one of its charges the rehabilitation of wounded soldiers,” building on pedagogic precedents long since set in the classroom.⁴⁴ If interwar advances in the study of film reliably informed the convalescent experiences of veterans and influenced as well the military’s wartime uptake of “therapeutic film,” the military, along with such agencies as the Office of War Information (OWI) and the New York State War Council, would forcefully return the favor as early as 1944, ensuring that the latest war-themed documentaries would be screened in university classrooms—including, on numerous occasions, Morkovin’s own.⁴⁵

In many instances, military spectatorship was upheld as a model for future forms of “film education.” “Nine million young men and women have seen over 3,500 training films,” wrote NYU’s Robert Gessner in December 1943. “Those returning to college or entering anew will be visual-minded.”⁴⁶ Catalyzed by wartime needs, close collaborations between the armed forces and various institutions of higher education frequently involved the donation of military documentaries to university film libraries and the subsequent screening of these documentaries as key components of curricula. By 1944, the School of Military Neuropsychiatry at New York University was regularly offering screenings of military documentaries (including the Army’s Psychiatric Procedures in the Combat Area and the Navy’s Introduction to Combat Fatigue), prints of which were provided by the NYU Film Library.⁴⁷ NYU was, in many ways, well positioned to employ such documentaries as teaching tools: in the 1930s, Frederic Thrasher’s for-credit course on film appreciation had included special lectures from representatives of the American Social Hygiene Association and the American Psychiatric Association; the psychiatrist A. A. Brill, whose guest lecture for Thrasher was entitled “Psychiatric Aspects of Motion Pictures,” argued for film’s capacity to both reflect complex psychological states and to convey such complexity to spectators, including psychiatrists-in-training.⁴⁸

State and federal agencies may have facilitated the distribution of military documentaries to colleges and universities, but they had divergent views regarding other sites of exhibition. Much as the Creel Committee had placed certain constraints on the production and circulation of films during World War I, new organizations attempted to regulate cinema during American involvement in World War II. Established by President Roosevelt in June 1942, the OWI, headed by Elmer Davis, faced considerable Republican opposition and, beginning in 1943, major budget cuts. But it managed to play an important part in the wartime cultivation of nontheatrical nonfiction film, as Charles R. Acland has shown. The agency’s objectives were, in Acland’s words, “to capitalize upon and expand existing school and community media facilities, thereby helping to orchestrate channels through which government information could reach local audiences.” The OWI’s National 16mm Advisory Committee, which helped to coordinate nationwide screenings of nonfiction films, paid particular attention to nontheatrical venues, from labor unions to women’s clubs, and it succeeded in reaching an estimated three hundred million viewers by the end of the war. In 1946, the Advisory Committee was transformed into a civilian operation known as the Film Council of America. Run by volunteers with funding from the Carnegie Corporation and other donors, it continued to promote nontheatrical nonfiction film—often in explicitly Griersonian terms—as a vehicle of “good citizenship.”⁴⁹

The OWI distributed 16mm prints of such “exceptional,” broadly educative military documentaries as The Negro Soldier (Stuart Heisler, 1944) to unions (including the United Auto Workers), PTAs, prisons, museums (including MoMA), and the American Council on Race Relations.⁵⁰ Though it rarely received the cooperation of the armed forces, and occasionally ignored the demands of other government agencies (as when it elected to release the notorious Japanese Relocation [Milton S. Eisenhower, 1942] despite sound warnings from the War Relocation Authority), the OWI remained at least nominally committed to identifying nontheatrical distribution streams for military films, as Acland’s research reveals. By 1944, the OWI had deposited seventy films (including many produced by the Army Signal Corps) at the NYU Film Library, which regularly distributed them to war plants, secondary schools, and various “adult organizations.”⁵¹

Even before its budget was cut, however, the OWI was arguably far less powerful than the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations, which “helped regulate the flow of information to the American people,” and which often clashed with the other agency.⁵² (Such clashes are parodied in the wartime comedy The Doughgirls [James V. Kern, 1944], which features the apocryphal “Administration of Inter-Bureau Coordination,” and a character who complains “the OEW telephoned the DMA that they can’t act on that WMP matter until they get an OK from AIBC.”) The OWI, which was “keenly aware” of the military’s “psychiatric problem,” was caught between the impulse to follow the urgent recommendations of military psychiatrists (who wanted their work publicized) and the need to comply with the War Department’s initial injunctions against informing Americans of the “epidemic” of war trauma. Confronted with these conflicting demands, the OWI hastily prepared “psychiatric” press releases without conferring with either the Surgeon General’s Office or the Army’s Neuropsychiatry Consultants Division, leading to the dissemination of “many erroneous facts,” in the words of psychiatrist William C. Menninger. As Menninger recognized as early as 1942, military psychiatrists would need to prevail upon the Signal Corps and other military filmmaking outfits to begin production on documentaries that could counteract the misinformation for which the OWI was partly responsible.⁵³

By 1942, the military had access to a growing number of facilities for the production of its own films. Certain establishments predated the war, among them the Army’s Training Film Production Laboratory at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and the Army War College photographic libraries in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Recognizing the need for a centralized film unit that would save the Army money, the Signal Corps purchased the former Paramount studios in Astoria, New York, establishing the Signal Corps Photographic Center (later the Army Pictorial Center) in 1942.⁵⁴ Several other facilities were sold to or temporarily occupied by the military. The Office of Strategic Services, for instance, took over the Department of Agriculture’s Motion Picture Division for the duration of World War II, while the Navy requisitioned a vast movie studio in Glenview, Illinois, the property of David A. Smart, a co-founder of Coronet Films.⁵⁵ As Anthony Slide points out, “America’s entry into the Second World War provided a major boost for non-theatrical film production and underlined the prominence that the U.S. government could command in the field through its various production activities.”⁵⁶

The fruits of this production were distributed in several ways. First and foremost, military documentaries—including those about war trauma and psychotherapy—circulated among all branches of the armed forces. As early as the summer of 1941, the Bureau of Aeronautics began providing films for use throughout the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard. Later, the Navy would produce films in its own facilities, including the Photographic Science Laboratory at Anacostia, DC (“built to Hollywood standards,” as Peter Maslowski points out), and the Navy Photographic Services Depot in Hollywood, California, and then distribute these to other branches.⁵⁷ While the Navy could, by way of the Bureau of Aeronautics, claim authorship of the 1944 documentary Introduction to Combat Fatigue, the film was quickly adopted by the Army for use in Army hospitals and other convalescent centers.⁵⁸

Throughout the 1940s, the military was constantly discovering “new film uses,” “more effective utilization methods,” and, perhaps most importantly, new sites of exhibition.⁵⁹ “Therapeutic films” became staples on hospital ships carrying psychiatric patients, and, by 1944, all Army and Navy transport vessels were equipped for 16mm film screenings. Medicine in Action, a series of short documentaries produced by the Navy between 1944 and 1946, often identified the institution’s “auxiliary hospital ships” as spaces of film exhibition, insisting on cinema’s therapeutic function for men recovering from “the wounds of war.” While the military’s use of cinema was often understood—and often publicized by the armed forces themselves—in terms of a pronounced commitment to instructing the greatest number of people in the shortest amount of time, it was never intended to replace flesh-and-blood teachers—or, for that matter, flesh-and-blood therapists. In the words of an official statement from the Army, films “supplement but do not supplant the work of instructors.”⁶⁰

In the armed forces, film was part of a multimedia economy that also embraced radio broadcasts and transcriptions, phonograph records, pamphlets, and symposia. Produced in collaboration with the Army, the CBS radio series Assignment Home was devoted to “veteran readjustment,” its scripts tending to detail trauma and psychotherapy in accordance with official military films. In fact, at least two episodes of the series were explicit “tie-ins” to the Navy’s 1945 documentary Combat Fatigue: Assignment Home, which the Army had adopted for its own use.⁶¹ Radio and, increasingly, television broadcasts were intended to supplement film instruction in ways that were difficult to achieve with such traditional conveyors of institutional information as recruitment officers. Indeed, Assignment Home was designed to duplicate “live instruction” and disseminate it to a broad swath of radio listeners, much as the Defense Department’s public-service television program The Big Picture (1950 – 1975) would later seek to spread information—including information about trauma and psychotherapy—via syndication.⁶²

These new protocols were necessitated by the military’s broadening commitment to providing information about war trauma and psychotherapy. With the help of Chicago Film Studios, an independent company specializing in nontheatrical nonfiction film, the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery made a series of “essential films” for hospital corpsmen, many of them addressing the subject of psychoneurosis.⁶³ At around the same time, the Signal Corps was adapting psychologist John Dollard’s 1943 study Fear in Battle into its Fighting Men series of training films.⁶⁴ Dollard, a psychologist at Yale University’s Institute of Human Relations, had studied three hundred veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the Spanish Civil War, his work helping to familiarize the Army with an array of psychosomatic symptoms (“feeling faint or weak,” “roaring or ringing sensation in ears,” “dryness of mouth and throat”).⁶⁵ Dollard, and the Signal Corps films based on his study, thus helped normalize trauma as a diversely symptomatic experience. Time magazine covered this confluence of academic inquiry and military training in November 1943, and Dollard, whose work emphasized the vast differences between the technologies of the two world wars, told Americans to expect more and greater cases of distress and anxiety.⁶⁶ But if film could reflect the results of Dollard’s study, so could it assure spectators of the reliability of military-psychiatric treatment. As an Army technical manual put it, filmmaking and filmgoing were among the “mental hygiene activities” intended to cultivate “a deeper appreciation on the part of military personnel of the wide range of individual personal and social needs and desires”—and of the accessibility and effectiveness of treatment.⁶⁷

A number of military documentaries reflexively address this “therapeutic” use of film, directly depicting screenings designed to teach as well as to “heal.” The Air Force’s short Wings Up (1943), for instance, emphasizes the pedagogic as well as rehabilitative function of nontheatrical films, while the Army’s Follow Me Again (1945) presents motion pictures as key elements of the Army Education Program, assisting veterans in their transition back to civilian life. Similarly, the Army documentaries Diary of a Sergeant (1945) and Half a Chance (1946) both feature nurses who screen nonfiction films meant to “aid rehabilitation,” but they also, in showing their traumatized protagonists’ return to civilian life, suggest new uses for these institutional works.

FIGURE 7. A therapeutic film screening for hospitalized servicemen in the Army’s Diary of a Sergeant (1945). Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

To be sure, some films were hardly “timeless”—hardly ceaselessly relevant amid seismic changes in military routines, objectives, and treatment protocols—but what was no longer needed in the armed forces could easily be made to matter to civilians. Often, a “declaration of obsolescence,” conveyed through a classified publication like the monthly Catalog of Training Films, came with recommendations for a film’s eventual use “beyond the armed services.”⁶⁸ This repurposing of “expired” documentaries was a major way in which the military, in David Culbert’s words, “contributed to what could be termed an audiovisual revolution in American higher education.”⁶⁹ The promiscuous spread of military documentaries via ever-expanding networks of nontheatrical distribution was difficult if not impossible to stop, as the Army itself discovered through its unsuccessful attempts to destroy all extant prints of the problematic Why We Fight entry The Battle of China, which continued to circulate, often in “minor,” sometimes literally underground locations (such as church basements) far beyond the surveillance capabilities of the armed forces.⁷⁰

More frequently, however, the military actively encouraged this promiscuity even in the handling of films long believed to have been “banned” or otherwise “suppressed,” such as Let There Be Light. “At no time in our history has it been so important that the layman have some grasp of [psychiatry’s] principles,” wrote William C. Menninger in 1946.⁷¹ The military that had made Menninger a brigadier general seemed to agree. When Menninger’s words appeared in print, the disturbing realities that had precipitated the War Department’s temporary “publicity blackout” were no less conspicuous, and they required constant intervention in the convenient form of films (many of them limited to just two reels) that could be screened in a variety of nontheatrical locations. As Martin Halliwell writes, “despite the supreme confidence that many had in science and medicine, the number of cases of combat fatigue during World War II indicated that the nation, which seemed purposeful and prosperous on the surface, underneath suffered from uncertainty and anxiety.”⁷² It was documentary, with its lofty, Griersonian associations, that offered a way of exposing and, ultimately, managing this traumatic underside of institutional and everyday life—promising to reveal, as Paul Rotha had written in 1935, the “meaning behind the thing and the significance underlying the person.”⁷³

TRAUMATIZING DOCUMENTARY

The trauma-themed films that the military produced—or that it merely adopted, inspired, or critiqued—should be understood as documentary and realist works by dint of their direct, evidential engagement with trauma as a verifiable yet elusive consequence of World War II, one whose comprehension and eventual treatment was seen as requiring a number of creative strategies typically taken to be beyond the ken of such categories as “instructional film,” “industrial film,” and “training film.” While such overlapping categories arguably “belong,” in some fundamental sense, to documentary as a capacious parent genre, and while they were certainly used throughout the 1940s to describe military-produced works about war trauma, they tend to signify a rote functionality far removed from the actual patterns and purposes of trauma-themed films, which sought not merely to teach, and not merely to promote (in the sense intended by institutional advertising), but also to inspire and even rehabilitate.⁷⁴ Inspiration and rehabilitation were hardly incompatible with the aims of instruction and public relations, but they demanded a formal and discursive flexibility capable of accommodating everything from therapeutic role play to diagnostic encounters between troubled servicemen and the sights and sounds of combat (particularly as captured on film). Military psychiatrists played a key role in shifting the military’s nonfiction films away from the terrain of the strictly functional and toward the more imaginative, experimental territory claimed for documentary at the time, particularly by John Grierson (whose films and film writings were hardly unknown in military circles), Joris Ivens (whose unfinished film Know Your Enemy: Japan was intended for the Army Signal Corps, from which Ivens was summarily dismissed in 1944), and Paul Rotha.⁷⁵

There was considerable governmental precedent for the military’s official position on documentary as an instructive, creative, and potentially therapeutic genre. During the 1930s, for instance, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had worked to situate its “uninspiring but necessary films” as “true documentary pictures,” laying some of the discursive groundwork for the military, which throughout World War II insisted that it was producing “motion pictures of documentary importance,” whatever their subjects and formal features.⁷⁶ Grierson, in his “First Principles of Documentary,” may have denigrated educational, scientific, industrial, and training films as “lower categories” of filmmaking far removed from the lofty echelons of documentary proper, but many producers of such films—including Raymond Evans, chief of the Division of Motion Pictures at the Department of Agriculture—firmly disagreed with him.⁷⁷ “That the straight ‘nuts and bolts’ training film, like the juvenile classroom film, exists outside rather than strictly within the documentary film area proper is a common opinion,” wrote Richard Griffith in the aftermath of World War II, as he looked back on what he called “the use of films by the U.S. armed services.”⁷⁸ “Common opinion” was hardly sacrosanct, however—something that Griffith appeared to misunderstand as he insisted that the “productions of the U.S. Army and Navy, remarkable and important though they were, do not really fall into the historic reading of documentary.”⁷⁹ That may be true of certain examples, but “psychiatric motion pictures” (as George S. Goldman and others called them) force us to contest Griffith’s claim that the military’s documentary enterprise failed to “further or even notably continue documentary’s main function of shaping or spreading constructive opinions and ideas for the good of mankind.”⁸⁰ More recently, Charles Musser has stressed the importance of developing “less prescriptive ideas in regard to the representational methods appropriate for documentary,” which would permit the reincorporation of long-marginalized films into the documentary tradition.⁸¹

It may be tempting to dismiss all military-produced films as mere “propaganda” artlessly designed to advance particular institutional objectives, but war trauma—a widely and often hotly debated topic in the 1940s—required nothing less than the “creative treatment of actuality,” to quote Grierson’s famous description of documentary, embellishing the blunt fact of trauma with strategies intended to teach as much as to treat and contain. As Cathy Caruth has written, trauma is characterized by “its refusal to be simply located,” whether spatially or temporally, as well as by “its insistent appearance outside the boundaries” believed to effectively separate fantasy from reality, fiction from nonfiction.⁸² In the influential terms of trauma studies, the seemingly fictive—a fantastical vision of danger, say—may well be factual as a specific experience of trauma, and admissible as one of its all-too-real symptoms. “Some types of sensory disturbances are accurate hallucinatory reproductions of sensations originally experienced in the traumatic event,” observed the American psychiatrist Abram Kardiner in 1941.⁸³ The field of trauma studies, with its respect for the psychoanalytic category of “subjective truth,” thus presents unique challenges to typical understandings of documentary evidence, as Janet Walker has argued.⁸⁴ Long before the appearance of Caruth and Walker’s groundbreaking work, however, the United States military was engaged in efforts to reimagine documentary according to the soldierly experience, psychiatric treatment, and public perception of war trauma, raising key questions about trauma’s historical relationship to representation.

The debates about documentary that had flourished in various North Atlantic countries in the 1930s were made intelligible to America’s wartime military in multiple ways. The writer Eric Knight, who studied British documentaries under the guidance of his friends Paul Rotha and John Grierson, took this knowledge to the Signal Corps in the early 1940s. Knight was merely one among many ambassadors of the British documentary movement and of Griersonian principles in particular, reliably influencing the development of the military’s “therapeutic films” by helping to circulate their British forbears.⁸⁵ With Knight (co-author of scripts for the Why We Fight series) came a number of influential British documentaries, including Neuropsychiatry 1943, a largely observational record of real patients, and Field Psychiatry for the Medical Officer (1944), which relied entirely on professional actors. Memorably, the latter film ends with its protagonist, an ambitious medical officer, being diagnosed with combat fatigue—a not-so-subtle suggestion that the condition may affect anyone, regardless of rank or experience. (“I would never have figured it could happen to him!” exclaims a character in Fox’s Twelve O’Clock High [Henry King, 1949], referring to the impact of combat fatigue on Gregory Peck’s brigadier general, who goes into a “state of shock—complete collapse.”) Whatever its melodramatic qualities and dependence on polished performers (including a young Trevor Howard, who plays a colonel who, despite his smugness, becomes a reasonably reliable source of “psychiatric knowledge”), Field Psychiatry’s relationship to documentary lies in its careful reconstruction of various clinical practices, from drug treatment to physical therapy to “diagnostic interviews.”

Like other “imported” films, Field Psychiatry for the Medical Officer was widely distributed within and beyond the American military during World War II, and it helped normalize the extension of familiar techniques of documentary reconstruction to the challenging subjects of trauma and psychotherapy. In the well-known Griersonian view, documentary differed from mere “films of fact,” which were exclusively reliant upon the camera’s “reproductive capacities”; the latter, then, offered “a method which describes only the surface values of a subject,” while documentary “more explosively reveals the reality of it.”⁸⁶ Military films about trauma and psychotherapy, which are very much devoted to “uncovering” and comprehending the “hidden” realities of the human mind, seemed thus to exemplify the distinctiveness of documentary, at least as Grierson had outlined it. Numerous military documentaries literalize this mode of inquiry through animation, figuring the “inner workings” of the mind as so many unruly cartoon characters (as in The Inside Story of Seaman Jones), or simply suggesting an “X-ray effect” that permits the viewer to see the deceptively “normal” brain inside the psychologically disturbed man.