Istituto Luce – Cinecittà
Profile of the organisation
Istituto Luce – Cinecittà is the most important cinema related public company in Italy, born from the merging of Cinecittà Holding with Istituto Luce, an institution established back in 1924 with the primary goal of using cinema to spread culture and knowledge.
Istituto Luce – Cinecittà holds today one of the most important European film and photographic historical archives (www.archivioluce.com), in which are collected and digitally catalogued more than 12.000 newsreels, 9.000 documentaries, 3.000.000 photos, and several other titles, ranging from films, dating back to the origins of cinema, to collections and film clips of 20th century events. This is one of the largest audiovisual footage collections in Europe concerning the history of the twentieth century, and it has also been nominated by UNESCO-Italy for the membership registration in the “Memory of the World” registry.
Luce’s Film Archive, with a total of more than 4.000 hours of footage, has been fully digitized and it was made accessible on-line since 1998.
Within the last 10 years Istituto Luce – Cinecittà has participated in several EU co-funded projects in the IST, eContentplus and ICT-PSPcalls, aiming at developing best practices related to digitization and access in the audiovisual domain. Among them, European Chronicles Online (ECHO), Video Active, European Film Gateway, EUscreen, EFG1914 and Presto4U.
Role in the project
In EuropeanaSpace Istituto Luce – Cinecittà will be involved in the EuropeanaTV pilot, mainly as content provider and in the evaluation of the system, and also in the dissemination of the project outcomes in the audiovisual domain and creative industry.
Key Personnel
Marco Rendina Project manager and IT specialist. Since 1996, he is collaborating with Cinecittà Luce (and other leading Italian audiovisual institutions, including Cineteca Nazionale), where he followed the development and realization of various digitization and applied research projects. In Cinecittà Luce he has followed several EU co-funded projects like ECHO, Video Active, European Film Gateway and EUscreen, EUscreenXL and Presto4U.
He is currently member of the Italian Organization for Standardization Working Group on Cinematographic Works (UNI GL6) and deputy member for Italy of the European Committee for Standardization – Technical Committee (CEN/TC 372) on Cinematographic Works, where he has been one of the editors of the EN 15907 standard on “Film identification – Enhancing interoperability of metadata – Element sets and structure”.
