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considers some of the historically specific debates about, aspirations for, and uses of documentary as a vehicle for honoring, monitoring, understanding, publicizing, and even “working through” war trauma, while occasionally conceding trauma’s contradictory and intractable character. The diverse objectives toward which documentary was mobilized are mirrored, in the films that I analyze here, by a diversity of formal strategies. Paying attention to trauma thus allows me to tell a more nuanced story about films that are either tendentiously denied the label of documentary or reduced to a limited, stable set of documentary techniques. It also demands that I address a number of films that, stored in the National Archives and Records Administration and at the National Library of Medicine, have not been cited in previous publications. As pedagogic and therapeutic engagements with PTSD and the politics of survival and recovery, these remarkable films merit close attention.

CHAPTER 1

      “Imaging the Mind”

       Military Psychiatry Meets Documentary Film

      “Wars today, accompanied by their terrific mechanical developments, create emotional stresses which are bound to hurt seriously large numbers of those engaged in them. It is the basic and major function of military psychiatrists to care for these people who have been made emotionally sick by the pressures of stresses of modern warfare.”

      —Dr. John Milne Murray, psychiatrist, Army Air Forces, 1947¹

      Between 1925 and 1940, the cost of caring for “psychologically disturbed” ex-servicemen, who occupied nearly half of all beds in Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals, approached one billion dollars.² By 1947, the situation had become graver still, with the VA forced to note that “the numbers of beds assigned to neurological and psychiatric patients exceed those of all other types put together,” and that “there is nothing vague about these figures.”³ World War II had dramatically expanded the cultural visibility of post-traumatic conditions, compelling the military to directly address this pronounced “psychiatric problem” through documentary film. As early as 1942, medical officers were given crash courses in psychiatry at, among other establishments, the Army’s School of Military Neuropsychiatry on Long Island, and psychiatrists were increasingly incorporated into the armed forces in an advisory capacity. World War II represented, as Rebecca Jo Plant puts it, “a major boon to American psychiatry”; it “spurred the ascendance of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches and the destigmatization and normalization of mental disorders, setting the stage for the flourishing of postwar therapeutic culture.”⁴ Many at the VA nevertheless believed that more needed to be done to draw attention to the psychological problems that veterans continued to confront in the postwar period. As Dr. Daniel Blain, chief of the VA’s Neuropsychiatry Division, put it in a 1947 report, “The size of the job to be done in this field has suffered from vagueness, exaggeration, misunderstanding, and sometimes a Pollyanna attitude of wishful thinking.”⁵ Such naïve optimism, Blain and others felt, could be countered through the ongoing distribution of “serious” films about trauma—works of nonfiction that, endorsed by the military, examined some of the practical difficulties of psychiatric treatment, particularly in understaffed or otherwise inadequate state facilities.⁶

      Focusing on World War II and its immediate aftermath, this chapter offers a genealogy of a particular documentary tendency, one tied to the concurrent rise of military psychiatry and of the military-industrial state. As the psychiatric treatment of combat-traumatized soldiers gained greater institutional and cultural visibility, so did particular techniques associated with—but scarcely limited to—documentary film. In accounts of the period, American documentary is typically understood as having been stymied by the needs of a federal government that had previously (as with the formation of the United States Film Service in 1938) placed a premium on documentary’s formal development as a tool for communicating government policy.⁷ Some scholars go so far as to argue that the Second World War merely extended the constraints that the Great Depression had placed on documentary artistry, ensuring a “patriotic” homogeneity in the wake of congressional attacks on the arguably partisan work of Pare Lorentz and others. Michael Renov rehearses this claim when he writes, “The priorities enforced by the Depression and World War II reined in the experimentalism and unabashed subjectivity of expression that had so enlivened documentary practice in the 1920s.”⁸ This is, of course, hardly true if one considers the contributions to wartime documentary of such creative, often self-aggrandizing figures as Frank Capra, John Ford, and John Huston, who inscribed their “government work” with various authorial signatures. But it is perhaps even less true if one looks at the priorities of military psychiatrists and other psychological professionals, which reach expression in a number of films that have long been left out of accounts of documentary’s development in the United States. Renov goes on to note that “[p]rivate visions and careerist goals have always commingled with the avowed social aims of collective documentary endeavors,” demanding precisely the kind of reevaluation of wartime nonfiction that he does not undertake in his account of historically-specific conservatism—a reevaluation that would bring to light the vital impact of individuals who, while not nearly as famous as Ford and Capra, far outnumbered such uniformed auteurs.⁹

      This book looks at some of the subjectivities—some of the “private visions” and “careerist goals”—of military psychiatrists and other psychological experts whose influence is abundantly evident in a range of “documentary endeavors,” including those carried out both (and often simultaneously) by Hollywood studios and various military filmmaking outfits, from the Signal Corps Photographic Center to the Training Films and Motion Picture Branch of the Bureau of Aeronautics. Despite their substantial contributions to documentary praxis in the 1940s, these individuals have largely been ignored, including by the few scholars who have touched upon Huston’s famous Let There Be Light, the production of which relied heavily upon the input and authority of four men: George S. Goldman, the psychiatrist who oversaw the military’s multipronged development of “psychiatric documentaries”; M. Ralph Kaufman, a psychiatrist who had developed (and filmed) hypnosis techniques for the treatment of those traumatized in the Battle of Okinawa, and who was a member of the teaching staff at Mason General Hospital, where Huston’s film was shot; John Spiegel, a psychiatrist who, with Roy Grinker, had advanced the use of sodium pentothal in a procedure known as “narcosynthesis”; and Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist who served as a liaison between Huston and the others, and who supervised the scriptwriting efforts of the director and his co-author, Signal Corps Captain Charles Kaufman. However illustrious, Hollywood filmmakers were hardly essential to this diagnostic and psychotherapeutic institutional enterprise, and their ideas had to be vetted by psychiatrists and other psychological experts whose presence was rapidly expanding throughout the military. The number of physicians assigned to the neuropsychiatric corps increased from thirty-five in 1941 to twenty-four hundred in 1946, and it was in this context of psychiatric expansion and experimentation that documentary and realist films began to centralize war trauma as a common yet treatable condition.¹⁰

      The experimental uses to which certain films were put, and their shifting meanings in the treatment of the combat-traumatized, recall Nathan Hale Jr.’s description of World War I as a “human laboratory” that “gave psychiatrists a new sense of mission and an expanded social role.”¹¹ By World War II, this social role had come to encompass new duties associated with documentary film production, distribution, and exhibition. The military psychiatrist did not, however, enjoy anything like the privilege of final cut. In most cases, he was subordinate to the chief of the medical service, who, while not a psychiatrist, was often called upon to approve scripts about war trauma.¹² There is no evidence to suggest that any such chief actually rejected or even tweaked film scripts, but some were known to be “entirely uninformed or even antagonistic to psychiatry,” and their mediating function was, at the very least, an odious source of delays for many psychiatrists eager to see their efforts translated from script to screen and disseminated to audiences.¹³ Such efforts helped to ensure, as psychiatrist William C. Menninger suggested, “wider acceptance and better understanding of psychiatry,” making war trauma and its treatment “evident to the layman.”¹⁴

      From the initial “narrow assumption that almost any type or degree

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