Let There Be Light

Director: John Huston

1946 / 74min / DCP

One of a series of documentaries that Huston produced while working with the US Army Signal Corps during and immediately after World War II, Let There Be Light, which depicts returning soldiers’ struggles with PTSD and their psychiatric treatment at a Long Island hospital, was suppressed by the military upon its completion, only finally premiering at Cannes in 1981. Everything that the segregated military of 1945 might have objected to in Huston’s film—the straightforward depiction of the catastrophic psychic damage of combat, the equal importance given to both white and Black soldiers—is what makes it a towering work: not of propaganda, but art.

preceded by America's in Real Trouble. America's in Real Trouble provided by The Chicago Film Archives.