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Traumatic Imprints. Noah Tsika
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Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520969926
Автор произведения Noah Tsika
Издательство Ingram
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.
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