Off Topic: Suppressed 1946 Film on WW2 Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome Interviews

1946 Interviews With Veterans Suffering From Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome: Film Restored and Post On the Internet   

LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946)

Let There Be Light (1946)
Producer: U.S. Army Pictorial Service, Signal Corps. Director: John Huston. Writers:Charles Kaufman and John Huston.Photographers: Stanley Cortez, John Doran, Lloyd Fromm, Joseph Jackman and George Smith. Narrator: Walter Huston. Music:Dimitri Tiomkin. Editors: William Reynolds and Gene Fowler, Jr. Transfer Note:Transferred from a 35mm B&W negative preserved by the National Archives and Records Administration. Running Time: 58 minutes.

John Huston’s World War II documentary Let There Be Lightis 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.

.Let There Be Light (1946)

Producer: U.S. Army Pictorial Service, Signal Corps. Director: John Huston.Writers: Charles Kaufman and John Huston. Photographers: Stanley Cortez, John Doran, Lloyd Fromm, Joseph Jackman and George Smith. Narrator:Walter Huston. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin.Editors: William Reynolds and Gene Fowler, Jr. Transfer Note: Transferred from a 35mm B&W negative preserved by the National Archives and Records Administration. Running Time: 58 minutes.

John Huston’s World War II documentaryLet 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:

The new negative was scanned to create a high-definition image file. The version shown here derives from that file. It is presented at a lower resolution to facilitate downloading and web viewing. Our hope is to improve this restoration still further. NARA plans to rescan the film at a 2K resolution (2048 x 1556) and use digital restoration tools to correct density shifts introduced during successive re-printings and to remove as much as possible of the dirt, dust, and scratches accumulated over the years. The resulting file will be synced with the restored magnetic track made by Chace Audio by Deluxe and then reformatted as HD, DVD, and web-quality copies. We hope to complete this additional work by the end of 2012. —Criss Kovac, NARA

WWW Link to film is National Film Preservation Foundation