Before it was PTSD, WWII "Let There Be Light" (1946)

After these decades of ignoring us from the Vietnam conflict, the soldiers of into veterans and the few civilians who recognized something else was going on, most of them coming from the ranks of the anti-war movement of that time, into the present past decade of two more long occupations and this time many with multiple tours, where ignoring is no longer possible. Nor is what we've known these decades that it affects the civilian populations of those within suffering through their own hell on earth silently and misdiagnosed after traumatic experiences in their lives or lives lived with trauma like the abused children. This was already known by the powers that be and yet they would readily lie to send others into new wars and long occupations in building that power of control and fear!

John Huston film about WWII soldiers that Army suppressed is restored

24 May 2012 - More than 65 years after it was suppressed by the Army, a powerful and controversial John Huston documentary about soldiers suffering from the psychological wounds of war has been restored by the National Archives and debuts Thursday on the Web.

“Let There Be Light” portrays GIs just back from the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific — trembling, stuttering, hollow-eyed and crying. Using a noir style, Huston filmed dozens of soldiers in unscripted scenes from their arrival at an Army psychiatric hospital on Long Island through weeks of often successful treatment, culminating in their release to go home.

The restoration “reveals the film’s full force,” said Scott Simmon, a film historian and English department chairman at the University of California, Davis.

Even after the Army approved its release in 1980, the poor quality of the prints and, in particular, the garbled soundtrack made it almost impossible to understand the whispers and mumbles of soldiers in some scenes.

The restored soundtrack “makes the film speak in a way it never could before,” Simmon said in an interview.

The film is striking for its potential relevance for a new generation of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, showing soldiers struggling to cope with what was then commonly called shell shock, and more formally labeled psychoneurosis, but is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

“We hope that by making ‘Let There Be Light’ freely available — and by drawing attention to it — that the courageous documentary will find the audience it was intended to serve,” said Annette Melville, director of the National Film Preservation Foundation, which funded the restoration.

The film, commissioned by the Army near the end of the war, was intended to prepare Americans for the realities of what combat had done to those sent to war but also to show that their psychological wounds could often be treated with therapy.

But when it came time to release the film, the Army balked, claiming it violated the privacy of the soldiers involved. Huston never bought that explanation.

“I think it boils down to the fact that they wanted to maintain the ‘warrior’ myth, which said that our Americans went to war and came back all the stronger for the experience, standing tall and proud for having served their country well,” Huston wrote years later in his autobiography. read more>>>

‘Let There Be Light’: An excerpt from Huston’s WWII documentary

To view the whole film, visit the National Film Preservation Foundation website where you'll also find on the right notes about including this:

John Huston’s World War II documentary Let There Be Light is so legendary for its censorship controversy that its sheer power as a film has been easy to miss. Produced by the U.S. Army in 1945, it pioneered unscripted interview techniques to take an unprecedented look into the psychological wounds of war. However, by the time the film was first allowed a public screening—in December 1980—its remarkable innovations in style and subject, which in the 1940s were at least a decade ahead of their time, could be taken as old hat, especially because of the poor quality of then-available prints. This new restoration finally reveals the film’s full force.

The subject of Let There Be Light is what we’d now label PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—among returning soldiers, and if the term is of more recent invention than Huston’s film, that’s in good part precisely because such sympathetic examinations of the condition were swept under the rug until after the Vietnam era. What World War II soldiers still called “shell-shock” was variously labeled “psychoneurosis” or “neuropsychosis” by physicians, and it was under the working title of The Returning Psychoneurotics that the assignment was given in June 1945 to Huston, then a major in the Army’s Signal Corps. He later described how he went about the project: read more>>>