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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

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