Archivissima 2026. What is Not There
The Night of Archives returns to Genoa with Archivissima 2026, the edition built around the theme “What is Not There”: an evening that opens to the public the collections, holdings and places of the city’s memory normally reserved for scholars.
Discover the extraordinary photographic collection of Erminio Cresta during the Night of Archives: 55,000 glass plate negatives and film stock, recently digitized and enhanced. The Photographic Archive of the DocSAI Center opens its doors for a fascinating immersion into Genoa’s visual heritage, between history and memory. A unique opportunity to explore behind the scenes of archival research and discover rarely accessible images.
“Fantastic Planet” at Cinema Sivori
Also part of the Night of Archives, the Mario Novaro Foundation ETS — in partnership with Circuito Cinema Genova and Dr. Sara Tongiani — presents a free-admission evening dedicated to animation cinema and its rich tradition, revisited through the pioneering eye of Claudio Bertieri, a critic and scholar with particular expertise in Eastern European and international cinema.
On Friday 5 June at 6.30 pm, at Cinema Sivori, the programme features the screening of the animated feature “Fantastic Planet” (La planète sauvage, 1973) by René Laloux, a Franco-Czechoslovak co-production that distils the experimentation developed by the two schools. The screening will be paired with the short film “Les Escargots” (1966), by the same director, and introduced by Sara Tongiani, a scholar of film history. Admission is free while seats last.
The theme of the 2026 edition of Archivissima, “What is Not There”, is an opportunity to rediscover Bertieri’s role: he was among the first to approach, study and promote animation cinema from what were then distant and little-known film traditions. With an interdisciplinary and far-sighted approach, the critic grasped the vitality, formal rigour and experimental spirit of the Eastern European authors — today regarded as great masters of animation — setting down, in the 1970s, the history and analysis of those schools and their techniques in several monographs, most notably Il cinema di animazione bulgaro (Bulgarian Animation Cinema, 1972) and Il cinema di animazione ungherese (Hungarian Animation Cinema, 1973).
The evening also aims to promote and enhance the Claudio Bertieri Archival Fund, preserved at the Mario Novaro Foundation: it holds the volumes and magazines of his personal library, his study and working papers, and all the other materials gathered by the critic throughout his life — magazines, drawings, photographs, postcards, lobby cards, posters, brochures, film-related objects and cinema ephemera, newspaper clippings and memorabilia.
