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the war,” in the words of one former military psychiatrist who, looking back on his work, stressed how psychiatric concepts “were expanded in several major respects,” including through the pedagogic and therapeutic use of documentary film.¹⁵ “We psychiatrists are primarily doctors,” said Air Forces psychiatrist John M. Murray in 1947, noting that, throughout World War II, “we were called upon to perform many auxiliary and secondary functions,” not only supervising and participating in the production of documentaries but also contributing to debates about the potentially deleterious effects of Hollywood films that, through various fictive devices, “distorted” military psychiatry.¹⁶ “World War II was a key point in the history of American psychoanalysis,” argues Jonathan Michel Metzl; it “allowed for the first demonstrated ‘success’ in the treatment of neurotic symptoms in noninstitutional settings” such as the camps and convalescent centers near the North African front lines where Grinker and Spiegel administered “interactive” drug therapies, or the soundstages on which their psychiatric disciples made reenactment a central technique in military documentaries about war trauma—a way of “reviving” the recent past for therapeutic and filmic purposes.¹⁷

      The rhetoric of visibility and invisibility would inform the work of psychological experts throughout the postwar period. The clinical psychologist John Watkins, for instance, would dedicate his 1949 casebook Hypnotherapy of War Neuroses “to the many veterans whose wounds, though real, are invisible,” but his efforts were frequently coopted by filmmakers eager to visualize war trauma.¹⁸ Watkins’ wartime work at the Welch Convalescent Hospital in Daytona Beach, Florida, which involved exhorting hypnotized patients to imagine “a large movie screen” on which to unfold various fantasy scenarios, was occasionally filmed in order to be studied (and, of course, duplicated at other facilities), its commitment to “the inner unconscious content of the patient’s emotional life” nevertheless constituting an object of visual documentation.¹⁹ Set during World War II, the service comedy Imitation General (George Marshall, 1958) reflects this historical development, as a traumatized soldier (who’s “really in terrible shape” and “ought to be in a hospital”) confesses that “what’s wrong” with him “is nothing you can see”: “I think it must be what they call combat fatigue.” Adding “You know what it is—you’ve seen it,” the soldier points to a paradox that military documentaries were increasingly designed to manage—that of the sheer invisibility of a “mental disease” that cinema alone promised to make visible and knowable. “I can’t find a scratch on him!” complains a hospital corpsman of one of his traumatized charges in the Navy’s The N.P. Patient (1944); the film proceeds to “visualize” neuroses through the “psychodramatic,” proto-Method acting of both experienced and nonprofessional performers. Using animation to indicate how the scars of tuberculosis may be seen via X-rays, the Army’s Shades of Gray (1947) suggests that “psychiatric disturbances” are equally invisible to the naked eye, requiring the intervention of documentary film, which promises a “deeper understanding” of mental health, in order to achieve intelligibility.²⁰

      Shorts and features about unseen “matters of the mind” reliably contributed to the American documentary tradition that Jonathan Kahana has identified with the term “intelligence work,” “making visible the invisible or ‘phantom’ realities that shape the experience of the ordinary Americans in whose name power is exercised and contested.”²¹ Following a period of medical uncertainty and official suppression, such films quickly became key mediators among multiple, at times competing systems of knowledge, lending trauma—especially war trauma—an audiovisual coherence made widely accessible via an abundance of state and private film distribution organs. That the identification and treatment of trauma continued to be characterized by professional disputes did not diminish but, rather, enhanced the documentary legitimacy of associated films. As Kahana argues, progressive documentary in the 1930s and 1940s tended to tackle that which was “not yet frozen in an established idea, position, or institution,” even as it promised to concretize various complex political, medical, and sociological concepts.²²

      While it may seem paradoxical to align military-sponsored films with the progressive frameworks that Kahana explores, to polarize the two categories is to fail to recognize important formal as well as ideological continuities. As Alice Lovejoy argues, the state is necessarily multifaceted, the military often “at the vanguard not only of media technology but also of media aesthetics”—a “laboratory for film form and language,” “a pioneer in cinema’s applications and institutions.”²³ By the 1940s, American military filmmakers were, to varying degrees, familiar with the writings of documentary critics John Grierson and Paul Rotha, and their ranks included (at least for a time) the Dutch socialist Joris Ivens, who worked for the Army Signal Corps.²⁴ State documentary remained, in this period, distinctly amenable to experimentation—at times rooted in actual clinical practice—while simultaneously offering, as Kahana puts it, “a means for grounding political abstractions like state, party, movement, and nation in the apparently natural formation of the American people.”²⁵ Psychological traumas and their exploratory treatment constituted ripe terrain for documentary—a word that was widely used in this period, including to refer to “mere” military films made in a variety of styles. Take, for instance, a single 1944 issue of the trade paper Motion Picture Herald, which offered no fewer than ten uses of the term to describe military-sponsored films, at one point carefully explaining that William Wyler’s The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944)—a production of the Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit—is more than a simple “aviation report,” and is in fact a “war documentary.”²⁶ This liberal application of “documentary” extended even to military films that weren’t made by Oscar-winning directors like Wyler—that, in fact, arrived as anonymous accounts of various mundane activities, or that, like many a dramatic treatment of trauma and psychotherapy, suggested the carefully staged action of a Hollywood studio production. Taking their cues from the military as well as from the widely circulated work of Grierson and Rotha, Motion Picture Herald and other publications regularly employed the term “dramatic documentary” throughout the war, echoing its use among psychiatrists and other psychological experts who believed that trauma could best be addressed via reenactment and other theatrical, even fantasmatic techniques.²⁷

      “The most misunderstood of all human ills are those due to problems of the mind,” reads the opening crawl of the 1944 documentary The Inside Story of Seaman Jones. “It is, of course, impossible to fully cover this subject in any single book or picture, but this presentation, made for you, endeavors to clarify the most common, fundamental troubles that beset us as a result of emotional upset.”²⁸ Produced by Paramount Pictures as a Coast Guard training film, and based, in part, on psychiatrist Robert H. Felix’s work at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, The Inside Story of Seaman Jones would soon become one of the most widely distributed of all military documentaries made during World War II, its depiction of “emotional disturbances” at once responsive to the unique realities of armed service and potentially relevant to individuals in all walks—and at virtually all stages—of life. As its official distributor, the Navy remained committed, for over two decades, to ensuring the film’s broad circulation as both an instrument of instruction and a source of therapy. In short, The Inside Story of Seaman Jones was thought to be good publicity for the military, especially as the United States (like the film’s young male subject) entered a new “life phase”—a postwar period of global leadership. By 1946, with the film reaching members of all branches of the armed forces as well as secondary schools, businesses, churches, and community centers nationwide, its opening address to the viewer could easily be recast as capacious in the extreme, the words “made for you” addressed as much to students in the classroom as to workers in the factory.²⁹

      One of many trauma-themed military films produced during and after the war, The Inside Story of Seaman Jones boasts sequences that purport to explain dissociation as well as a range of psychosomatic symptoms, crosscutting between cartoon characters (such as a censor whose job is to “police” the borders between the conscious and unconscious mind) and live-action subjects who simulate psychogenic illness and its careful treatment. The film focuses on the plight of Pat Jones,

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