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The Cinema Museum incorporates the Enric Soler i Raspall Collection, a key legacy of children's cinema
A collection of more than a thousand pieces that traces the history of domestic children's cinema and the international impact of Cine NIC.
The Cinema Museum has significantly enriched its collections with the incorporation of the Enric Soler i Raspall Collection, an exceptional donation dedicated to children's domestic cinema. The set, made up of 1,029 objects, complements and expands the museum's heritage in the field of projectors, accessories and documentation linked to one of the most popular forms of introduction to cinema during the 20th century.
The collection offers a broad journey through the diversity of formats and content that characterized children's cinema over more than seven decades, since the 1930s. Its central axis is Cine NIC, a highly successful Catalan cinematographic toy that marked generations of children, but also includes its variants, adaptations and international expansion.
A writer specializing in travel literature, Enric Soler i Raspall discovered his fascination with Cine NIC at a young age. This passion was reactivated in 2000, when a visit to the Cinema Museum prompted him to begin a systematic task of collecting and research. Since then, he has gathered equipment, accessories and extensive documentation, driven by curiosity and the desire to preserve the memory of children's cinema.
The collection donated to the museum includes 83 projectors and viewers, 517 films or image strips, 170 documents related to children's cinema and 260 miscellaneous objects, to which must be added seven filing cabinets with reproduced documentation on patents, instruction manuals, advertising and specialized articles. This material constitutes a first-rate source for historical and technical research on cinema designed for children.
The Enric Soler i Raspall Collection has as its starting point the Cine NIC, a system that survived for nearly forty years, enjoyed a notable international resonance and became a model for numerous children's projectors produced around the world. The pieces provided allow us to delve deeper into key aspects such as the diffusion of the patent outside Catalonia, the adaptation of the system by multiple international companies and the global boom in the production and marketing of cinema equipment for children, with a wide variety of brands, models and projection formats.
With this donation, the Cinema Museum consolidates and completes the part of its collections dedicated to children's cinema, precisely complementing the Tomàs Mallol Collection. The incorporation of this set allows to fill both typological and chronological gaps and reinforces the museum as a reference in the conservation and dissemination of cinematographic heritage, also in its most playful and formative expressions.
