Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa

The archive has been established after an agreement among Piedmont Region, Ivrea Municipality, Telecom spa Company and CSC. The archive activities started in late 2006 and nowadays the archive is member of FIAF.

The CSC had the industrial and advertisement films collections in its vaults since the 50s. An Italian law enacted in 1949 establishes that every time a new Italian fiction film is produced, one single copy of it has to be stored in the CSC. That’s why the Archive owns and manages mostly the whole Italian film heritage. Because of this peculiarity they didn’t get the opportunity to plan an enhancement strategy for industrial materials stored by Italian companies: because they paid more attention to valorize Italian fiction films. Because of this situation, these film materials had never any dedicated preservation strategies and collection management, without any cataloguing and identification. In 1990s, a more serious consideration of industrial and advertisement films emerged in Europe in both academic and film archives’ fields. As a consequence of this new European interest on these materials, the CSC decided to set up a totally industrial film-dedicated archive. The renewed interest on industrial films also allowed to enhance a field of Italian cinema production that had been forgotten for a very long time. Films produced for industrial cinema by Italian fiction directors allow us to go over their filmography through a different point of view. Archivists, in industrial films’ archives, found unpublished films made by important directors. This means that industrial cinema is not just essential to record the history of Italian industry, but even to extend the history of Italian cinema.

At present, the CIAN collection already consists of 82.000 reels.

CIAN’s mission is identification, cataloguing, conservation, preservation and valorization of industrial and advertisement films made by some important Italian companies like B Borsalino, Bosca, Breda, Innocenti, GTT, GFT, Montecatini, Montedison, Nino Cerruti, Edison,  Fiat, Ferrovie dello Stato, Olivetti, Recchi, Martini & Rossi, Marzotto, Necchi, Rancilio, Aurora, Italgas, Birra Peroni, Aem Milano, Venchi Unica, Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo, Istituto per il Commercio Estero, Necchi, Metropolitana Milanese, Enea e l’Enea Antartide, Fargo Film, Documento Film, RPR, Buttafarro, Film Master e Rectafilm, Art Doc Festival, Edoardo Fadini, Filippo Paolone, Documento film and the Congregation Salesiana.

The Archive carries forward an intense restoration and digitizing activity of these materials, recording economic and social history of twentieth century in Italy. Industrial cinema, since 1930 to 1980, represented an important field of company strategy and produced a lot of documents. These films deal with several looks of business life:
production, such as assembly line’s images, training films made for employers, and the relationship with consumers, made through advertising films. Industrial films even paid a specific attention on welfare that the company created for employers as: working men’s clubs, refectories, welfare works, kindergartens and holiday camps for employer’s children. This image heritage allows us to go over the evolution of industrial production, social relations, economy and, in more general terms, work world in Italy.

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