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Traumatic Imprints. Noah Tsika
Читать онлайн.Название Traumatic Imprints
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520969926
Автор произведения Noah Tsika
Издательство Ingram
The notion that documentaries could serve to fortify the minds of “fighting men” was widely embraced not only by the military but also by the American popular press. Even the editors of Look magazine insisted that “wounded soldiers derive unconscious therapeutic benefit” from film screenings.139 In their 1945 volume Movie Lot to Beach Head, the editors argued that documentaries intended for the “treatment of psychoneurotics” represented the apotheosis of the military’s “medical films”—works designed to “aid and protect our wounded.”140 Surveying how soldiers are “conditioned psychologically” by the use of nonfiction film, the Look editors emphasized the function of military documentaries as “therapeutic stimuli,” particularly in such nontheatrical settings as field hospitals, rest camps, and troopships.141 If such an investment in the “psychological dimensions” of cinema can be dated all the way back to the work of Hugo Münsterberg, whose The Photoplay: A Psychological Study was published in 1916, it was also influenced by new clinical developments. During World War II, military psychiatrists repeatedly identified “post-traumatic syndrome” as a principal “neuropsychiatric problem” plaguing current and former servicemen, and films reflected this discovery by insisting on the complexity of trauma’s lasting effects.142
TRAUMATIC IMPRINTS
“To this day, that first face of death [in combat] is imprinted on my mind like a leaf in a fossil, never to fade away.”
—Sam Fuller143
“Traumatic imprints” are both tangible—haptic in the sense epitomized by fallout from the explosion of the first atomic bomb, which contaminated faraway cornstalks used to package film for Eastman Kodak, whose shipments were irrevocably damaged as a result—and suggestive of the extent to which “war neuroses” function in tropological terms in American cinema.144 Produced by Cascade Pictures of California for the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (1947–1959), the short film Self-Preservation in an Atomic Bomb Attack (1950) vividly illustrates these two interpretations of traumatic imprints. The film opens with disturbing footage of the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the sight of which, the voice-over narrator says, “sorta gave a guy the shakes.”145 Just as he is about to elaborate, the film strip breaks—and is thus revealed to have been constitutive of a film-within-a-film. At the outset, then, Self-Preservation in an Atomic Bomb Attack creatively suggests the traumatic impact of its own subject, literalized through the obliteration of the medium’s very materiality. In this respect, the film recalls the Navy’s 1945 short This Could Be America, which shows the death of the Army Air Forces cameraman responsible for much of its footage; his corpse carefully laid out for the camera, he is presented as a victim of the film’s very subject. It also anticipates a remarkable moment in the anthology film Far From Vietnam (Joris Ivens, et al., 1967): while she was filming the activities of the Viet Cong, Michele Ray’s camera “went berserk,” as the narrator puts it. “She tore up the film, and perhaps the result”—which Far From Vietnam presents in all its Brakhage-esque abstractness—“resembled the cry she wanted to express.”
Cutting from the film strip’s spontaneous destruction (as though the celluloid itself were unable to sustain an investigation into the psychological effects of atomic warfare), Self-Preservation reveals a typical nontheatrical exhibition site—a military classroom, where four uniformed men (including a puzzled projectionist) have gathered to engage with images “imprinted” by nuclear weapons. Celebrating the tearing of the film strip, one soldier requests a replacement—“something easier to take,” such as a “rootin’-tootin’ western, with men fighting it out the old-fashioned way” (a request echoed by the narrator of Let There Be Light, who, ventriloquizing through patients forced to watch so many military-produced documentaries, asks, “How ’bout a good movie for a change?”). Another audience member echoes the soldier’s resistance, denouncing upsetting representations of “that atom business.” Both men must be schooled by an officer who somberly insists on the pedagogic value of “traumatic” documentaries—what Self-Preservation in an Atomic Bomb Attack itself represents.
The motif of imprinting is thus, in this book, a multidirectional one, as much responsive to a Bazinian conception of realism as to the efforts of military psychiatrists to use cinema as a means of training members of the armed forces (including fellow physicians). As Alison Winter argues, “it is likely that, in many cases, the on-screen instructor was the best that could be offered to [medical] trainees” amid the relative scarcity of military psychiatrists.146 Documentaries about psychoneurosis and psychotherapy were thus intended, in part, to imprint medical staff members with an awareness of trauma’s effects, cultivating certain psychotherapeutic patterns of clinical behavior. But they were also meant to reflect the dialectics of visibility and invisibility that could render intelligible various “unphotographable mental illnesses,” as Brian Winston calls them.147
Numerous military psychiatrists insisted that, far from being impossibly elusive, trauma in fact imprinted the human mind, and that these imprints could be revealed through the diverse devices of documentary (from animation to reenactment to the on-camera, synch-sound interview). Roy Grinker and John Spiegel argued that combat trauma “is not like the writing on a slate that can be erased, leaving the slate as it was before. Combat leaves a lasting impression on men’s minds.”148 By employing the motif of the imprint, I hope also to evoke Derrida’s claim that psychoanalysis “does not, by accident, privilege the figures of the imprint and of imprinting”—that “its discourse concerns, first of all, the stock of ‘impressions’ and the deciphering of inscriptions, but also their censorship and repression.”149 For Derrida, such repression itself “leaves an imprint” whose traumatic character is rehearsed again and again—much as war, implicated as traumatic yet “vindicated” through the work of military psychiatry, has become a permanent condition of American power.150
PSYCHOLOGICALLY “USEFUL CINEMA”
“At present, I am working in Hollywood, as an advisor on psychosocial pictures. That means I tell producers and directors how different minds should react under different conditions in these psychological pictures. It used to be you went to a theater, and you sat down, you watched a picture, and you relaxed, and when you walked out you said, ‘Isn’t that wonderful? The boy married the girl.’ You enjoyed yourself. That’s no good! My job is to make you sit on the edge of your chair and worry and suffer and figure out why this should happen.”
—Sid Caesar’s parody of a Viennese psychiatrist in Columbia’s The Guilt of Janet Ames (Henry Levin, 1947)
During and after the war, the military was able to aggressively pursue the broad and persistent publicizing and distribution of its own films as well as those that it had sponsored or otherwise “adopted.” Contrary to conventional wisdom, these included numerous documentaries about war trauma and psychotherapy—subjects that, far from being anxiously denied, were in fact the fulcrum of postwar efforts to spread military influence through nontheatrical film. Such funders of the behavioral sciences as the Office of Naval Research (established in August 1946) and the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (established in May 1946) were committed to furthering the wartime cause of psychological rehabilitation through the sponsorship of nonfiction