PAGOT Collection

It gathers the whole animation and ‘real life’ film output of the Pagotfilm, one of the first Italian advertising agency having a real industrial structure and dealing with the creation and production of cartoons. It was founded in Milan at the end of the ‘40s by Nino and Toni Pagot. The two brothers’creativity gave rise to some unforgettable ‘characters’ such as Calimero the chick, Grisù the little dragon and many others. The material, preserved on 35 and 16mm nitrate and safety film, was deposited at the Cineteca Italiana film archive in the year 2002. It generally covers the span of time 1946-1972. Among the highlights there are The Brothers Dynamite (1949), the first full length animation film ever produced in our country: its bright original colours were given a new life through a careful digital restoration. Another title worth mentioning is Lalla piccola Lalla (1946), a Technicolor animated short narrating a little girl’s fantastic adventures, vaguely inspired by Alice in Wonderland. Besides these, there are hundreds of colour commercials, both animated and ‘real life’, realized by the Pagotfilm production house during the ‘50s, as well as some series belonging to Carosello, a very famous TV advertising programme mixing sketches from real life, cartoons and jingles, broadcast from 1957 to 1977.

ASAC Collection

Asac’s (Historical Archive for Contemporary Art) institutional function is to preserve and promote the artistic heritage of the Biennale of Venice. Since 2001 the Fondazione Cineteca Italiana has been housing under the best preservation practices the whole Asac film heritage, consisting of around 1,200 film titles – both fiction and documentary films – shown for over forty years at the Venice Film Festival editions. The material is of national and international origin, on 35 and 16mm film stock. What makes it especially distinctive is that it consists of original unreleased editions (therefore uncut as they were not subject to censorship visa), all with Italian subtitles; they comprise works by well-known directors as well as actuality films and newsreels shot often by anonymous filmmakers. The meta-data we have chosen to made available pertain to some 250 documents coming from the latter group, ranging from about the ‘50s to the early ‘70s, covering the most varied topics and reporting on cultural, sport, scientific, political and social events all around the world.

In addition to the a.m. material, we foresee to provide further meta-data belonging to oldest and smaller collections not yet included, and forming part of our historical inventory.