Luigi Sussi was born in Gorizia in 1894. Trained in Vienna, Rome and Prague, he was a surgeon of the Viennese school and contributed innovations to surgery techniques in the thirties. He became, between the end of the twenties and the Second World War, one of the most prominent public figures in Gorizia. He became head of the surgery department at S. Giusto in 1925, director of the civil hospital in 1927, professor of surgical pathology in Padova, head of the civil hospital, “podestà” between 1943 and 1944, author of scientific texts and president of the Royal National Aviation Union. The film, preserved in a single positive nitrate print, is first of all a brief (and unfortunately incomplete) foray into the medical and scientific documentary. It shows a mutilated body, over which bristling and gloved hands perform cuts, incisions, divarications, removals and sutures. The documentary aspect, even though prevalent, steers towards a “corporeal” cinema, that seems to proceed towards medical abstraction and depersonalisation. Maybe it aspires, covertly under crude exposition, to be recognized as the cinematographic representation of the Surgeon’s Art.

Simone Venturini – DAMS Gorizia