Selling “Psycho Films”

Abstract

Trauma-themed military documentaries served a variety of promotional purposes—many of them strictly corporate—during and after World War II. These experiments in institutional advertising, with their emphasis on the therapeutic dimensions of extensive militarization, were hardly limited to the postwar period. In a fundamental sense, they originated with the military’s wartime efforts to contain widespread concerns regarding war trauma—efforts that met the militant tone of certain orientation films with a more measured, even somber reflection on the psychic costs of combat.