Let There Be Light

A documentary John Huston made for the army itself: the treatment of 75 psychologically wounded veterans of the Second World War at Mason General Hospital in New York. On screen are cases of psychoneurosis, amnesia and acute anxiety, along with hypnosis and group therapy. Huston shot roughly 375,000 feet of film and cut it to under an hour. When it was finished the army blocked its release, on the grounds that showing mental damage would make postwar recruitment harder. The critic James Agee noted the situation briefly at the time: the War Department had forbidden it civilian circulation. The ban held for thirty-five years. Secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander Jr. only released it in 1981, at the Cannes Film Festival, and that print had very poor sound. The National Film Preservation Foundation funded a restoration and the corrected version appeared in May 2012. The film had entered the National Film Registry in 2010. Paul Thomas Anderson drew on it thematically for The Master in 2012 and it was included with that film's home video releases. Who it is for: anyone interested in the history of war trauma and in how a state buried a film it commissioned itself. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a wholly unstaged documentary. Whether some scenes were arranged for the camera has been argued for years.