«A great success, the film Resto Umano is an interesting and sensational two-part drama by the Pathé Consortium, which contains one of the many scenes of seduction that unfortunately occur in our day in age.» («La Cine-Fono e la Rivista Fono-Cinematografica», 15/5/1913)


Who is the «human remains»? The film tells the story of an unsatisfied wife who reads Madame Bovary and abandons her conjugal home to follow an unreliable young man. The epilogue of the film shows her corpse about to undergo an autopsy. The doctor called to perform the autopsy is precisely her husband, unaware of his fate. Thus, is the corpse the «human remains» which gives the film its name? In reality, the plot centers on the doctor, Dr. Mario, and it is here that the true modernity of the film lies. The true «human remains» are not constituted by the corpse, but instead by the doctor who is hurt because his wife has abandoned him, and who is reduced to a poor madman.

Restoration of the film was carried out in 1996, from a positive dupe on safety stock, held by the Cinémathèque Française. In light of new information regarding the colors, the film can now be seen with the rich, original tinting and toning, thanks to Desmetcolor. The intertitles, missing from the negative, were reconstructed thanks to an original script of the film held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Arts du Spectacle, and translated into Italian.

Alessia Navantieri, Michele Canosa 

Between 1909 and 1914 FAI produced 126 film; afterwards, its activity progressively decreased until in the twenties it produced only one film per year. Of the whole production of more than 150 features only sixty have been found for the time being. At first sight what was advertised at the time seems to find confirmation: costume features had the lion’s share, whether they were period pieces or adaptations of classical literary or theatre works (from Shakespeare to Schiller, and so forth). However – and this cannot be taken for granted – the so-called “psychological films” are not missing, namely bourgeois melodramas like this surprisingResto umano (1912), with Guido Brignone: a lady readsMadame Bovary and ends up in a rogue’arms, a phoney earl who ruins her and kills her at the end… The husband of the lady is, to be precise, a respected doctor; he is asked to carry out the post-mortem examination of a body, which turns out to be his wife’s. Not so bad for afilm d’art! How will it end? The doctor loses his mind – but this I have learnt it from a contemporary plot description as the film print is not complete.

Michele Canosa, “Muto di luce”, in Fotogenia, n. 4/5, 1999