CSC – National Archives of Enterprise Cinema

Introduction

The audiovisual heritage preserved by the CSC – ARCHIVIO NAZIONALE CINEMA IMPRESA was also the subject of an agreement with the General Directorate for Archives for the creation of a YouTube channel on business cinema, CinemaimpresaTV. The main objective of the initiative is to make the great heritage of business archives created between 1911 and 2011 known on the web, making it possible for researchers, students or simply curious people to consult audiovisual documents of fundamental importance for reconstructing the economic and social history of the last century.

CinemaimpresaTV is constantly updated, at the moment thousands of films are available, including from company archives not kept in Ivrea such as Ansaldo, Poltrone Frau, Eni, Barilla and Piaggio.

CSC – National Archives of Enterprise Cinema

In 2006, the was Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa inaugurated in Ivrea, in agreement with the Experimental Centre of Cinematography, the Piedmont Region and the Municipality of Ivrea and Telecom Italia Spa, for the preservation and dissemination of visual documents produced in the enterprise sector.

The Archive, located in the former Olivetti kindergarten designed by Arch. Mario Ridolfi, preserves about 82. 000 reels of film made since the beginning of the last century by companies such as Aem Milano, Aurora Penne, Birra Peroni, Borsalino, Bosca, Breda, Edison, Fiat, Ferrovie dello Stato, Frama Film International, GFT, GTT, Innocenti, IREN, Istituto per il Commercio Estero, Italgas, Metropolitana Milanese, Montecatini, Montedison, Necchi, Nino Cerruti, Olivetti, Rancilio, Recchi, Menabrea, Venchi Unica, Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo, research organisations such as Enea and Enea Antartide; production companies such as Frama Film International-Victor J Tognola, Fargo Film, Documento Film, RPR, Buttafarro, Showbiz-Ranuccio Sodi, Film Master and Rectafilm, cultural associations Art Doc Festival, FEDIC and private individuals such as Edoardo Fadini, Filippo Paolone, Agata Guttadauro, Arcangelo Mazzoleni, Andrea Bernacchi, Ranuccio Sodi, Antonio Canevarolo and Corrado Farina.

In recent years, the Archive has opened up to film genres such as religious cinema, with films from the Missionary Institute of the Consolata, the Salesian Congregation, the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo, the Jewish Documentation Centre of Milan, the Tavola Valdese Archive and Mediacor; experimental and militant cinema and family cinema, of which it holds one of the largest national collections: over 10,000 films bearing witness to the evolution of Italian society from a citizen’s point of view.

Family films

There was a time when preserving the memory of our daily ceremonies – the weddings, the christenings, the new car, the holidays, the pictures of the new city we moved to in search of work – took technical expertise and financial sacrifice, but the result was worth it.

Daily memory traces were in fact built to last, to be seen in family gatherings, to be commented on among friends. In short, they contributed to social occasions.

Years later, these documents of our recent daily history are often difficult to preserve. Photographs are forgotten at the bottom of drawers, films are no longer shown because technologies have evolved in the meantime. These are daily chronicles that deserve to be preserved because, as the decades pass, images of workplaces, family and group rituals become evidence of the evolution of an entire community, that is, they become ‘history’. The Mi Ricordo project found echoes of collective history in individual and family memories to reconstruct social transformations.

With this in mind, the National Film Archive has launched the project ‘I remember – Everyone’s archive’, to rediscover the visual testimonies of our recent past, to preserve and repropose them, to reconstruct and rethink ‘the way we were’. To relive, stage by stage, the path taken by our community and rediscover the roots of what we are today, with clarity and detachment, but also with pride.

The family films preserved in Ivrea were collected between 2015 and 2022, throughout the country, with a particular focus on Piedmont. The collections made were in areas characterised by particular industrial fabrics such as: Ivrea, Biella, Turin and Cuneo, and within the Waldensian and Italian Jewish communities.

Ninety per cent of the recovered films have been digitised and systematic indexing of the materials is underway. A small part of the titles is already available on the channel MI RICORDO-L’ARCHIVIO DI TUTTI. The films were shot between 1927 and 1992 and are in 9.5mm, 8mm, Super8 and 16mm format.

The Cineteca Nazionale – Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa preserves its collections also relying on film repositories made according to the standards of the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF), and on an in-house laboratory that digitises all major film formats up to 5K resolution and digitises the most popular cassette and open reel magnetic tapes. The laboratory is also equipped with professional software for digital image and audio restoration.

The videos

These are the searchable videos of some of the funds held at CSC – ARCHIVIO NAZIONALE CINEMA IMPRESA: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSoV9O5mpHiO9xy8DxkaUow

The films of Italian Jewish families

CSC-Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa in Ivrea and the CDEC Foundation in collaboration with the Shoah Memorial in Milan,the Jewish Community of Turin,the Shoah Museum Foundation of Rome and the MEIS of Ferrara, started a national campaign to collect, digitise and catalogue the films kept by Jewish families in Italy.

To date, some 1,000 films have been collected, covering over 170 hours of material shot between 1928 and 1984.

The idea stems from an initial research carried out by journalist Claudio della Seta, who had unearthed an important nucleus of these materials scattered between Italy and Argentina.

Old family films and amateur footage are a submerged heritage that if recovered and archived properly become visual testimonies in which History has left traces of itself. The project was aimed at all Jewish families, or those with some connection to the Jewish world, to make available the film material they keep.

It is an important source, the consultation of which can help contemporary scholars reconstruct environments, give faces and a voice to the 20th century Jewish families and communities.

The films were collected in Ivrea, Milan, Rome, Turin and Ferrara and digitised in Ivrea by the Archivio Nazionale Cinema d’Impresa, which then preserved the originals. This was followed by archiving and indexing with the ultimate goal of making the visual memory of the Italian 20th century available for consultation.

Segni Film Fund

(1928/1936)

The Di Segni family collection consists of 36 16mm films shot between 1928 and 1936 by Salvatore Di Segni (Rome, 1879-Lugano, 1945). Finding these films has been a research project that has almost the unbelievable, conducted between Italy and Argentina by journalist Claudio Della Seta. The recovery started with some film footage from 1923 found in his house in Rome and which, digitised in 2014 revealing among other things the only film images of Italian Jews subsequently murdered in the Shoah, has given rise to a now vast research strand. Following in the footsteps of the descendants of Salvatore Di Segni, his grandparents’ uncle and owner of the film camera, Della Seta managed to trace the numerous reels shot in later years to a country home near Buenos Aires where they had been taken by Salvatore’s son, Franco Di Segni, and kept by his niece Daniela Di Segni and great-grandson Gabriel Sagel.