Between 1906 and 1908 a professor of neurology, Camillo Negro, with his assistant Giuseppe Roasenda and Roberto Omegna, an expert cameraman, filmed some of his patients in the Cottolengo charity hospital and the Policlinico in Turin. During the First World War he continued his scientific cinema project in Turin’s military hospital, documenting the effects of the fighting on shell-shocked troops returning from the front line.
Inspired by the experience of French surgeon Eugène Doyen and particularly Romanian neurologist Gheorghe Marinesco, Negro was among the first to employ film technology for the purposes of scientific research and dissemination, achieving remarkable results, in aesthetic as well as medical terms. His films are distinguished not only by the quality of their photography, and the sympathetic onscreen presence of Negro, but also the sensitivity with which the patients are shown; powerful in their visual impact, they record the advanced stages of a variety of illnesses.
In the contemporary press, accounts of the lectures given by Negro indicate that the footage had the structure of an anthology, organized into chapters or episodes, which he modified several times in the 1910s and 20s.
Presented abroad as well as in Italy, the footage was a great academic success, but was never released commercially. Following Negro’s death in 1927 it languished, invisible, for decades, considered even by the most scrupulous experts to be nothing more than a short documentary of only a few metres. In the early 1980s the noted Italian historian and critic Alberto Farassino described the material he had seen of La neuropatologia: a fragment conserved at the Istituto Luce, which was included by Virgilio Tosi in his documentary on Omegna, dealing with the fits of a blindfolded hysteric, and two unprojectable nitrate reels held by Maria Adriana Prolo at the archive in Turin. Believing these “scraps” to be the film’s only surviving sequences, Farassino wrote: “Even in a fragment of film a few metres long, even in an offcut, there is life that has passed and been recorded forever. And often it takes just a couple of frames to make a story.”
An in-depth analysis of the fragments subsequently preserved, and the discovery of new nitrate material held in the Museo del Cinema, made it possible to assemble an anthology (about 1,000 metres, in 35mm), edited by the Museo in co-operation with the Neuroscience Department of the University of Turin, which was realized at the Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna in 2011. Starting from an analysis of the sources, a new editing sequence was devised, so that all the miscellaneous material could be correctly presented in a coherent order. Of crucial importance for this analysis were the paper documents held in a “private Omegna archive”, information obtained from the historian Bujor T. Rîpeanu, and comparison with films conserved in the Arhiva Nationala de Filme in Bucharest.
The first part of the anthology (29′, b&w) presents the episodes shot between 1906 and 1908, based on a detailed account dated 12 March 1908 of a screening at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, published in the first issue of Phono-Cinéma-Revue (March 1908). The editing of this sequence corresponds to medical and viewing logic alike, with a progression of “cases” from the  particular to the general. The middle part (3′, b&w) consists of images showing Negro surrounded by a team of doctors and students. The material depicting shell-shock is collected in the third part of the anthology (16′, b&w and colour), with cases documenting the war’s devastating impact in clinical-neurological terms. One of the most significant and distressing sequences among the new additions shows a young man reliving the horror of the trenches in a room in the military hospital.

Claudia Gianetto

Parts one and two of this compilation film (lasting 32 minutes), will be screened in the section “Rediscoveries and Restorations” (R&R); the third part (16 minutes), of a shell-shock victim, is in “The Effects of War.”