The Bell Laboratory Science Series - The Capra Films

The Capra Films

The first four films of the series were produced and written by Frank Capra from 1952–1956. As described by biographer Joseph McBride, Capra had retired from feature filmmaking by 1952, due in part to the turmoil of the Hollywood Blacklist era. McBride writes that Capra "undoubtedly realized that the AT&T job was a way of going back to work quietly and rehabilitating his image." Matthew Gunter compares Capra's involvement with the Bell series to his work on wartime propaganda and training films, "As in the creation of the war documentaries, Capra dove into the work and rediscovered his passion for the filmmaking process. Like his work on the war films, he employed found footage and animation to verify, illustrate, and document what was being said in the voice-over narration." Capra later described the films, "Those four films about science, hand woven with bits of celluloid, were sprightly patterns of poesy and fact; fresh ideas were their main charm, a rather elegant charm, we thought, much like the light-hearted but disciplined charm of a Mozart composition." After the Bell series, Capra returned to feature films as the director of A Hole in the Head (1959).