LITMIR.BIZ

      FIGURE 6. The “clean,” focused spectatorial mind—free of any neuroses—in Film Tactics (1945). Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

      Typically dismissed as “ephemeral films”—a designation that is often wrongly conflated with “nontheatrical films”—military documentaries were, in fact, designed to last.⁶⁸ This is particularly obvious when one examines the public relations directives of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, along with the related goals of the American Association for the Advancement of Psychology, the American Association for Adult Education, and the Carnegie Corporation, which often subsidized the production and distribution of military-approved films.⁶⁹ Numerous national organizations embraced these films long after the end of the war. For instance, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, which in the late 1940s had 325 local offices (each with its own film library), regularly acquired “old” military documentaries (particularly those about the Holocaust, atomic power, and psychotherapy), which it lent free of charge to community groups and other interested parties.⁷⁰ Similarly, the League of Women Voters, various Junior Leagues, and the National Publicity Council for Health and Welfare Services all used military films to further their shared commitment to “mental hygiene,” screening these documentaries alongside works produced by the National Film Board of Canada (such as The Feeling of Rejection [1947]) and the United Auto Workers (such as Brotherhood of Man [1946]).⁷¹ At the same time, film societies—including Amos Vogel’s legendary Cinema 16—were instrumental in cultivating appreciation for “films of fact and purpose,” particularly those that featured psychological experiments (such as Aggression and Destruction Games: Balloons [1941], produced by a group of psychologists at Vassar College) and various other “psychological demonstration films” (such as works initially intended for military use).⁷² Trauma-themed films produced by and for the armed forces remained very much at home in this environment—instruments and illustrations of a new therapeutic ethos.

      So-called “mental health films” made their way to Cinema 16 thanks to the efforts of the New York University (NYU) Film Library, which, during the war, was made the exclusive distributor of these and other “psychological documentaries.” That such films were valued for their pedagogic as well as therapeutic potential had much to do with precedents set by the military. “There is vast and effective use of films in the armed services, and the public is well aware of this,” wrote the board of NYU’s Educational Film Institute mere weeks after V-E Day.⁷³ Two years earlier, many at NYU were already envisioning ways of supplementing the work of the Office of War Information (OWI), the War Activities Committee, and other government agencies by ensuring the continued circulation of a variety of nonfiction films, including those produced by or for the military. “The war will revolutionize education,” predicted Robert Gessner, chairman of NYU’s Department of Motion Pictures, in 1943. “Over 3,500 Army and Navy training films are demonstrating that the human mind can be taught and trained in difficult subjects in a shorter time and in a more thorough manner than the old lecture-textbook method . . . Today an American soldier can say that one reel of training film is worth a thousand textbooks.”⁷⁴

      With its reflexive emphasis on the effective translation of typed “psychiatric notes” into a dynamic documentary film, The Inside Story of Seaman Jones seemed to concur. When, in the early 1950s, the film was essentially “retranslated” into written form, the resulting mass-market paperback (entitled simply The Inside Story and written “under the direction” of Yale psychiatrist Fritz Redlich and VA psychologist Jacob Levine) contained a “layman’s preface” explaining that cartoons can be reliable conveyors of psychoanalytic insight. Much as the film features animated sequences that purport to visualize the “inner workings” of the human mind, the book boasts over one hundred cartoons portraying various “human predicaments”—all of them reminders of the film’s mimetic flexibility, its insistence that psychoneuroses can be modeled in many ways.⁷⁵

      It is now widely accepted that, as Damion Searls puts it, “World War II was the turning point in the history of mental health in America.”⁷⁶ Less understood is the role that cinema—and, in particular, nontheatrical nonfiction film—played in this process. If, in Ellen Dwyer’s words, World War II “helped psychiatrists move out of the asylum and into the community at large,” documentary films were among the most reliable vehicles for their transportation, not only translating medical knowledge into vernacular terms but also familiarizing audiences with the faces, voices, and clinical techniques of particular therapists.⁷⁷ The military had long since accepted the superiority of audiovisual media to more “static” pedagogic forms as a means of educating enlisted men and women about psychological matters. This institutional shift from written documents, such as the Selective Service’s Medical Circular No. 1 (1940)—derided by psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan as “a child’s guide to psychiatric diagnosis”—to more sophisticated audiovisual techniques laid much of the discursive and material groundwork for the later use of “therapeutic films” in a wide variety of civilian settings.⁷⁸

      Whether to communicate the military’s “humanitarian” aims and its lasting commitment (ostensibly shared by the Veterans Administration) to rehabilitating its traumatized members, or simply to advertise the achievements of military psychiatrists increasingly responsible for treating civilian patients, these films were recycled via a range of nontheatrical distribution networks, surviving well past the cessation of hostilities and certainly irrespective of whatever labels (“classified,” “restricted,” “educational,” “training,” “orientation”) were once nominally attached to them. John Huston’s Army Signal Corps documentary Let There Be Light (1946) offers a key case in point. “Suppressed” by the military, which denied it a commercial theatrical release until 1980, the film was nevertheless given a very public “tour of the state” of Minnesota by governor Luther Youngdahl in the late 1940s—part of Youngdahl’s campaign to improve conditions in state mental hospitals and promote a military-approved conception of psychiatric care. On a single day in January 1949, nearly three thousand Minnesotans saw Let There Be Light in back-to-back screenings at the historic Lowry Hotel in Minneapolis, where Huston’s “special attraction”—prints of which were purchased from the VA by the State of Minnesota, their public use sponsored by such organizations as the Interclub

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