“Casualties of the Spirit”

Abstract

Through its diverse documentary devices, John Huston’s Army Signal Corps film Let There Be Light (1946) helped both to crystalize and to catalyze representations of combat trauma in the military as well as in Hollywood, serving as a key (if somewhat occluded) mediator between the two institutions. But it was far from the only military-produced documentary of the period to grapple, in observational fashion, with the effects of combat trauma, recording various therapeutic methods and enjoying a broad nontheatrical exhibition. Its institutional and filmic contexts form the subject of this chapter.