Traumatic Imprints - Noah Tsika

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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

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