LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

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

Скачать книгу