Completely forbidden – Weekend

Only two propaganda documentaries commissioned by the US Army during and immediately after World War II did not suit the customer so much that they were banned from showing: “The Battle of San Pietro” and “Let There Be Light.” Both were directed by John Huston, the author of The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo and The Asphalt Jungle, a singer of reckless decision-making who was only interested in the collision of despair and fate in any story – and the solemn beauty of defeat.

Text: Ksenia Rozhdestvenskaya

“Let There Be Light,” filmed in 1946 at a military hospital on Long Island, was first shown only 35 years later, in 1981, at the Cannes Film Festival. Today this film can be found freely available online. This is a detailed, fascinating account of the psychiatric treatment of soldiers suffering from “shell shock”, “anxious heart”, “war neuroses” (these conditions were later collectively called PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder). The hour-long film shows how young people undergo rehabilitation. The voiceover (read by Huston’s father, actor Walter Huston) is full of doubts and sadness: can these people be cured? What actually happens to a person in war, to a person who is faced with a situation “beyond human endurance”?

The limits of human strength have always interested John Huston, one of the best – no, probably not: one of the coolest Hollywood directors. By the start of World War II, Huston had already received several Oscar nominations as a screenwriter, and his directorial debut, the noir The Maltese Falcon, was nominated in the Best Picture category. For the army, he made four more or less documentaries: one almost entertaining, one standard and two amazing – these were banned immediately after test screenings, because instead of propaganda videos, Huston, without noticing it, created a great anti-war movie.

Mark Harris, author of Five Came Home, a book about Hollywood directors involved in World War II, has closely traced the stories of Huston, John Ford, Frank Capra, George Stephen and William Wyler, all of whom made propaganda documentaries about and in the war. Each director did what he knew how to do, and Frank Capra’s Why We Fight is a stark contrast to John Ford’s Oscar-winning Battle of Midway, a film Ford said he made “for American mothers.” Houston stands out among these five.

He began with the bouncy propaganda video How to Get Wings (1942), starring James Stewart as a buffoonish pilot. Eighteen minutes of advertising about the joys of military service: girls will love you, you will serve your country, and even if you are not a genius, the army will be glad to see you. The second film, already a classic documentary, “Message from the Aleutian Islands,” talked about the everyday military life of Alaska. And if here, according to critics, he was trying to “support our guys at the front,” then by the time he filmed his next film, “The Battle of San Pietro,” Huston himself became a guy at the front. He made films about people like himself.

It was a story about how living people become dead. Part of the film was a re-enactment – the film crew was not allowed on the battlefield, and Huston reconstructed the battle the day after it actually happened. This massacre claimed more than a thousand lives, the film showed the greed and cruelty of the war. Houston talked to the soldiers before the battle, asking them why they were fighting and what war meant to them. Many of them died the next day, and the director edited their live voiceovers with their dead bodies in the frame, turning his film not into an epitaph, but into a celebration of immortality. But those scenes were ultimately cut from the final cut, and Huston said he was completely fine with the changes.

When The Battle of San Pietro was first shown to high-ranking military officials, one by one they walked out. Houston was left alone, the film was banned. “San Pietro” could not be shown to the public – but General George Marshall, then chief of staff of the US Army, decided that it would be a good training film for soldiers who had not yet been on the battlefield. Marshall generally believed that soldiers needed “sensitive and objective information films,” which the army was unable to produce. For the Battle of San Pietro, Houston received the rank of major.

Many years later, Mark Harris tried to prove that the film contained no more than two minutes of real, unreconstructed chronicle. But many fans of “The Battle of San Pietro” – including Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese – believe that it doesn’t matter whether it was a re-enactment or a real battle: such a production serves “a higher truth, a more unbending truth.”

“Let There Be Light” told even more “higher truth” about the war. According to the advance notice, there are no staged shots in the film at all: “The camera simply recorded everything that happened in the military hospital.” Houston set up two cameras and recorded the conversation between the soldier and the psychiatrist. The army needed a film from which it would be clear that soldiers with “psychoneurosis” who returned from the war are “not lunatics”, that they can be hired, and Huston discusses this problem several times, gives the floor to the characters themselves, lets them speak out your fears. His heroes are guys “raised in peace and taught to hate war.” They went through the war, and now some of them cannot sleep, some are tormented by obsessive actions, some are paralyzed, some don’t even remember their name – but they all have one thing in common: fear, a feeling of impending disaster, a feeling total loneliness. “I was disgusted all the time, I was tired all the time, I didn’t want to live.” The camera records all their problems – one is unable to tell the doctors anything, the other is impossible to understand, the third avoids direct gaze. “I don’t sleep well, I keep dreaming that I’m in battle.”

Patients undergo an encephalogram, undergo Rorschach tests, and are given barbiturates to induce a state close to hypnosis and eliminate stressful thoughts. During a collective therapy session, the specialist behaves like a kind teacher, the soldiers remember their childhood and see how their parental patterns of behavior influenced them. (A few years later, Huston, who became interested in psychotherapy, would film the biographical drama Freud.)

A hypnosis session forces one of the patients to return to the moment of the explosion in Okinawa, which completely erased his memory, to relive it and leave it in the past (after this session, the patient miraculously remembers his own name, the name of his mother and his father). Finally, optimistic music plays, all these people stop living in the past, they play baseball, they run, talk, think about the present and sometimes about the future.

But Let There Be Light wouldn’t be a John Huston film if it ended that way. In the finale, the former soldiers, who have learned to walk and talk again, begin to tire of the monotony of hospital days. They are ready to “come out of their own prison,” and now before them “lies a life full of endless possibilities of happiness and sadness…” says the voice-over and then interrupts itself: “How does a person find happiness?” At the end of the film, the cured patients are told: “On your shoulders lies the responsibility for the post-war world.”

The film was banned immediately and remained top secret for 35 years. The army explained the ban by saying that it was necessary to protect the privacy of the soldiers participating in the filming. Houston was sure that this was not the case: it was just that after such a spectacle, recruits would not be found. “Seeing a torn soul is worse than seeing physical wounds,” he explained. Huston was convinced that his films were interfering with the “war myth” in which soldiers returning from war were made stronger by their experiences.

The army nevertheless made its own propaganda on the same topic, re-shooting some scenes from Huston’s film frame by frame. The educational film Shades of Gray (1948) took a detailed look at the life of a conventional citizen who is subjected to various types of stress. The movie is boring – not because of the charts showing how a person in the “gray area of ​​mental health” copes with stress, but because of the dullly shot episodes of “real life” with beaming wives and chubby-cheeked children, with “Joe Smith” trying avoid stress at work, and with soldiers who suddenly become depressed. The film explained in convoluted language that nervous breakdowns happen, they can be easily treated, the army begins treatment at the first symptoms – and the person quickly returns to duty, cheerful and absolutely healthy.

Huston made a film about how people who returned from the war remain in the war, and it remains in them. When he was accused of making an anti-war film, he replied: “If I ever made a pro-war film in my life, shoot me.” Mark Harris believed that the war—and in particular his work on The Battle of San Pietro and Let There Be Light—made Huston skeptical of authority. They may ban (during the “witch hunt” the FBI found “direct quotes from Capital” in “Treasures of the Sierra Madre”), they may reward.

For Huston, working on the film was “an almost religious experience—seeing men who, at the beginning of treatment, could not speak or remember anything, and at the end they found themselves not completely cured, but returned to the state in which they went into army.” The very name “Let there be light” is not just a biblical allusion, but a story about the first day of creation, about peaceful life, about a new beginning of a new world. Houston was confident that the presence of the camera influenced the patients and helped them heal.

Critics who saw the film called it “beautiful and monstrous.” There is anguish in it, but there is no pathos; there is confusion in it, but there is also hope. There is despair and fate. And there is light.

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