Rafael Guevara F22 Doesn’t Study Filmmaking Because of His Famous Family

That all changed once Guevara tried directing. He went on to learn about his grandfather’s groundbreaking documentary Let There Be Light and is now using his own style as a documentarian to tackle the film’s creation and eventual ban by the United States Army.

We talked to him about his love of history, interest in World War II, and connecting the dots to find his own way in the industry he was born into.

What initially attracted you to Hampshire?

No grades. My mother always made it clear that I was required to go to college, but I had always hated school, especially grades. I heard that Hampshire was a school with no grades, which interested me. Then I heard about Ken Burns through a mutual friend and learned that he had gone to Hampshire and continued to praise and recommend it. I thought, “Well, if Ken Burns enjoyed Hampshire, maybe I will too.”

Were you interested in filmmaking before you started at Hampshire?

Actually, no. My family is full of filmmakers, actors, writers, those kinds of things, but those areas weren’t my focus. I always thought I was going to study government, politics, and international relations. When I was growing up, people would ask me if I was going to make movies like my grandfather, and I rebelled against that expectation.

Halfway through my first semester at Hampshire, I helped my mother film one of her writing courses. When it was done, her business partner said, “Wow, you're really good at directing!” I reconsidered my plans and discovered a real love for directing and kind of pivoted from there. When I told people what I was studying, they would often say, “Oh, like your grandfather,” and I would reply, “Well, yeah, but accidentally. It wasn’t his influence, I never met him.” He died long before I was born.  

Did you get inspiration from his work once you started directing?

It wasn’t a direct inspiration, but more specifically it was the fact that he was one of the five directors who went to World War II. He signed up and went off to the front lines to film what was going on. He was then asked by the Army to make the documentary Let There Be Light after the war. There’s a significance to what Let There Be Light revealed and there’s also the craziness of the censorship for the purposes of serving the American war machine. [Let There Be Light is recognized as the first examination of what is now known as posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. It also pioneered the documentary technique of filming unscripted interviews that give subjects lots of time and freedom to think and talk, which often leads to the revelation of new and unexpected information. The film was completed in 1946 but was subsequently banned because of its potential negative effects on armed forces recruiting. It wasn’t released until 1981.]

I love studying history, especially World War II, so it’s something I already know and care about. My mother had told me about Let There Be Light but I never looked into it deeply. Then I took Associate Professor of Media Studies Viveca Greene’s class on modern disinformation, Birds Aren’t Real. I realized it would be a cool project to look at Let There Be Light in terms of its censorship. I soon realized that I didn’t have enough time to cover everything I wanted to cover in my final paper, so it became the topic of my Div III.

What are your plans for it?

My Div III is going to be a short- to medium-length documentary about the creation of Let There Be Light, the resulting censorship, and the fight for its release. I want to look at the blatant censorship done in service to war. I’m in the early stages of compiling research and filling in the gaps of my own knowledge.

So much of what I know about John is word of mouth from my family, and their information is always in pieces, and the timeline of what he did and when is often unclear. For example, my mother recently told me about Colonel Paul Tibbets, who flew the Enola Gay and dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Apparently, he visited John in Ireland and they became friends, which is really interesting because in terms of work within the Army, they were in two different theaters during the war. This was a relationship developed by John personally after the war, and their relationship isn’t well known.

John had a tremendous interest in the field of psychology, which I think was part of his own PTSD; he was trying to understand how the human brain works. Why do soldiers feel this way after wars? Why can’t some people go to sleep unless there’s artillery firing? This was before anyone knew about or recognized PTSD; the only recognition of soldiers’ wartime trauma was shell shock, and at that time the term only applied to people having what were called nervous breakdowns during active fighting. The symptoms of what we now know to be PTSD were swept under the rug.

People denied that any negative long-term psychological effects of war existed and insisted that American soldiers were only improved by war, that they came home happier and healthier than ever. Let There Be Light was, I think, the first documented questioning of this. John filmed and observed soldiers who had come back from the war, starting with the first day of their admission to Mason General Hospital and continuing through the day of their release. He heard them talking about these personal issues and wondered, “Well . . . what’s going on?”

Part of the fun with this project is telling this story about my grandfather not just as a documentarian looking in from the outside but also as a family member. I’m learning about him through his sons, daughters, and grandchildren and other people who knew him. One of mother’s friends, Michael Fitzgerald, was a good friend of John’s and was also his producer. They worked together for 34 years, and I’ve been talking to him. I’m excited about having these personal connections that most documentarians don’t always have.

Do you have any post-Hampshire plans yet?

One of the first things I’d like to do is make a second half to my Div III documentary. I have a full-length docudrama in mind, one that combines interviews with family members and other experts talking about John and the making and censoring of Let There Be Light, with dramatized storytelling about the events of World War II and the postwar psychological turmoil. I’d like to finish the documentary section as a stand-alone project for my Div III and then take it apart, get a crew and some funding to film the dramatized part, and piece it all together.