ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Traumatic Imprints. Noah Tsika
Читать онлайн.Название Traumatic Imprints
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520969926
Автор произведения Noah Tsika
Издательство Ingram
A major agent of cinematic exchange between the military and private industry was the U.S. Office of Education’s Division of Visual Aids for War Training, which was established in 1941 in order to instruct millions of war industry workers. Producing “practical” as well as “inspirational” and even “therapeutic” films that often relied upon footage from the Army—and that just as frequently fed the Army’s own compilation films—the Division of Visual Aids for War Training maintained strong yet complicated ties to the armed forces.56 In some cases, the division considered its finished films sacrosanct, imposing numerous restrictions on military use. For instance, in 1946—its final year of production—the division complied with the Army’s request for its “inspirational documentary” Employing Disabled Workers in Industry (1946), outlining its restrictions in a letter to the Signal Corps: “[The film] must be shown to audiences where no charge is made for the showing and it cannot be cut, changed, or altered in any manner whatsoever.”57 Those at the Signal Corps Photographic Center were apparently happy to comply, labeling Employing Disabled Workers in Industry a “War Department Official Film” and earmarking it “for distribution to film libraries of hospitals designated for amputee care,” where it could better prepare veterans for postwar work than, say, a newsreel like United News, whose November 1945 edition featured a mere fifty seconds of footage of disabled veterans learning, as the voice-over narrator puts it, “the highly skilled trade of watchmaking.”58 By contrast, the twenty-minute running time of Employing Disabled Workers in Industry allowed the film to explore a range of employment options for injured veterans—including the “war work” (such as weapons testing and aircraft manufacturing) that so concerned both the Division of Visual Aids for War Training and the military itself.
When it was not working directly with the Signal Corps, the Office of Education was outsourcing film production to independent companies, whose work would reliably blur the line between documentary pedagogy and institutional advertising. The formal and ideological resemblance between military documentaries—including those about war trauma—and industrial and advertising films is at least partly attributable to such subcontractors, whose commercially opportunistic flexibility lent them a remarkably broad purview as early as the interwar period.59 Consider, for instance, Castle Films: established in 1924, this relatively small producer-distributor made advertising films for major corporations; in the 1940s, the company began producing shorts and features for various branches of the armed forces, including the Navy, which commissioned Castle’s Film Tactics (1945), a twenty-two-minute dramatization of how best to use actual military films in the classroom. In Film Tactics, which focuses on the “optimal utilization” of the Navy’s 1945 instructional short The Countermarch (also produced by Castle), a voice-over narrator exhorts officers to “get [enlisted men] ready for the film”—to “prepare their minds” by saying more than that “regulations require that we watch it”: “You’ve got to tell them what to look for in the film!” When a soldier becomes an inattentive film spectator, a hot, stuffy room may well be to blame, but “inner conflicts” are always worth considering, and they must be “overcome” not merely by the spectator himself but also by his superior officer, who must employ “psychological tactics” in order to “inspire” the serious viewing of a didactic short. Film Tactics takes us, as the narrator phrases it, “inside the mind,” where distractions abound, and specific neuroses—anthropomorphized in a manner that recalls the style of The Inside Story of Seaman Jones, and that evokes the dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí in the exactly contemporaneous Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)—conspire to prevent men from paying attention to potentially life-saving instructional films. Here, the arena of reception is at once a military classroom and a “cluttered mind” that must be cleared through the psychotherapeutic entreaties of a “film instructor.”
FIGURE 5. The “cluttered,” neurotic spectatorial mind in Film Tactics (1945). Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
This symbolic outsourcing of psychotherapy to non-medical officers, and the associated cultivation of techniques of self-management among all enlisted men, suggest the expanding influence of psychiatric and psychological discourses during World War II. Depicting the screening room as a workplace where “matters of the mind” must be “managed,” Film Tactics reflects then-current beliefs—most famously voiced by John Grierson—that the social technology of documentary could effectively unite disparate classes, its translational character “responsible at once to the individual instance and the totality,” as Jonathan Kahana puts it.60 Grierson was a known quantity among the military’s in-house filmmakers and subcontractors in the 1940s, his work providing some key templates for their efforts. It was Grierson who, upon becoming the inaugural commissioner of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in 1939, began subcontracting private companies (including Crawley Films and Associated Screen Studios) in order to meet the wartime demand for documentary, and his close personal ties to Hollywood producers—including Walter Wanger, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences during World War II—did not go unnoticed in American military circles. Throughout the 1940s, numerous NFB filmmakers, including George L. George, would go on to work for the U.S. Army Signal Corps on Grierson’s recommendation—an informal exchange program that helped to situate Griersonian ideals at the center of American military filmmaking.61 Establishing certain precedents for later military films, Wanger’s Private Worlds (Gregory La Cava, 1935) features a psychiatrist (played by Claudette Colbert) who decides to work in a mental hospital in order to understand the “lost souls” of the “lost generation,” including her lover, who, in a panic, fled the horrors of combat and was shot for cowardice. Both Grierson and Wanger were well acquainted with Walter Lippmann (Grierson had studied Lippmann during his tenure as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the University of Chicago, while Wanger had served alongside Lippmann as an officer in U.S. Army Intelligence and as a member of Woodrow Wilson’s staff at the Paris Peace Conference), and Lippmann’s famous insistence that a special cadre of experts was required for the management of American political and social life has its own analogues in military documentaries that tout psychiatrists and psychologists.62 (Even Private Worlds, made over a dozen years after the publication of Lippmann’s Public Opinion, features a Lippmannian collection of renowned psychiatrists who must learn to work together for the betterment of “all Americans.”) “Although Grierson is usually associated with a specifically British framework of governmental and liberal-capitalist institutions,” Kahana notes, “his programmatic statements from the 1920s through the 1940s presume a broadly Anglo-American philosophical and political field of discourse,” and they certainly had a bearing on the production of military documentaries about war trauma and its psychiatric treatment.63 Following the model of Grierson’s National Film Board, the U.S. Office of Education commissioned Caravel Films, a New York-based producer of industrial, advertising, and training films, to turn out a series of shorts on war trauma as a “workplace problem,”