Una piccola storia di provincia

The KinoMuseo in Valgrana (CN) is the result of over forty years of collecting heterogeneous material dedicated to cinema, by two amateur film directors from Turin, Brunella Audello and Vittorio Dabbene. Their collection counts over 10,000 items including pre-cinema devices (magic lanterns, polyoramas, Chinese shadows, zoetropes, praxinoscopes, cameras, optical games), posters, magazines, photographs and promotional material. The exhibition is divided into six rooms and is integrated by a newspaper archive with over 3,000 Italian and foreign magazines, and a library with over 600 volumes dedicated to cinema. The exhibition display unfolds from an initial space dedicated to Chinese shadows shows. This is followed by a gallery, with posters and stage photographs, which leads to the room dedicated to pre-cinema and silent films. The next room is dedicated to sound cinema, and it exhibits cameras, 8,16 and 35 mm films, magazines, posters and memorabilia. The last three rooms are dedicated to specific genres: western, noir, science fiction and erotic cinema. Although located in an extremely peripheral context – a village of about 800 inhabitants in an Alpine valley – the KinoMuseo represents an attempt to evolve from a private collection to an exhibition space open to the public, representing a small scale case-study on the construction of a cinema collection, its modes and times of acquisition, the choice and provenance of materials, the practices and criteria for organising and exhibiting the objects and documents.