The empathic screen : cinema and neuroscience

273 Pages·2020·30.122 MB·English

by  Frances Anderson, Vittorio Gallese, Michele Guerra

The Empathic Screen

The Empathic Screen
Cinema and Neuroscience
By
VITTORIO GALLESE AND MICHELE GUERRA
Translated by
FRANCES ANDERSON
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Originally published as Lo Schermo Empatico di Vittorio Gallese e Michele Guerra,
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Foreword
The Neuroscientific Turn
Consilience— the integration of knowledge generated across disciplines—
has been the talk of the town in some quarters for some time now. But rarely
has it been executed with such seriousness and panache as it has been in The
Empathic Screen, a collaboration between neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese and
film scholar Michele Guerra. Here they bring into dialogue Gallese’s command
of contemporary neuroscience, especially the line of research emerging from
the discovery of mirror neurons— in which Gallese played a central role— with
Guerra’s expert knowledge of the long tradition of film theory, stretching back
to the origins of cinema itself around the turn of the twentieth century. And, far
from being mere promissory chit- chat, the dialogue that Gallese and Guerra
conduct— between themselves, their immediate collaborators, the wider re-
search community, and the various historical traditions of film theory—i s
methodologically meaty. By combining close analysis of film style with the-
oretical reflection and neuroscientific experimentation, Gallese and Guerra
walk the consilient walk as well as talk the interdisciplinary talk. They seek to
triangulate cinematic experience through the integration of humanistic and
neuroscientific methods. But their dialogue is not closed or exclusive: through
the clarity of the book’s writing and the glossary of specialist terms provided by
the authors, readers not expert in either or both neuroscience and film theory
are welcomed into the conversation.
If the concern with interdisciplinarity and consilience is a hallmark of con-
temporary academia, in other ways The Empathic Screen roots itself in a wide-
ranging and deep engagement with film history, from its infancy to the most
current developments. An abiding concern of film theory has been with the
specificity of the medium of film—t he feature or features of it that make it dis-
tinctive and not quite like any pre- existing vehicle of representation or medium
of art. This fascination with specificity is evident even in the work of those the-
orists who have been officially skeptical about the idea of medium specificity,
like Noël Carroll, and even in those specific trends in film theory where it has
not appeared to be primary, such as contemporary post-s tructural film theory.
viii Foreword
Almost everyone drawn to thinking about cinema ends up facing the ques-
tion: what makes movies special? What is the distinctive power of movies?
Gallese and Guerra approach this question by posing two questions of their
own: why do movies fascinate us? And how do they engage us? Their answer to
both questions draws on the notion of embodied simulation, a theory of human
perception of and action in the world, including our interaction with other
human agents. According to the theory of embodied simulation, one of the
most basic ways in which a human agent relates to other agents is by simulating
the movements made, sensations felt, and emotions experienced by them. And
far from being a cool, abstract, theoretical affair, when humans simulate they
do so in embodied fashion, their vision, audition, and other senses working
together, allowing them to grasp shapes and textures, feel the affective states
of others, and kinesthetically mimic their conspecifics. Embodied simula-
tion is the foundation of human intersubjectivity in general, and empathy in
particular— long an object of fascination for film and literary scholars—a nd it
operates in multisensory fashion. As Gallese and Guerra put it, the neural inte-
gration of our sensory modalities is the rule rather than exception.
In the first instance, embodied simulation is a theory of human perception,
action, and interaction in general, and part of Gallese and Guerra’s agenda is
to show how, to a large degree, films are designed to allow the seamless carry-
over of the mechanisms of embodied simulation from the world itself to the
motion picture world. Before we can speak, we can perceive and move and
resonate to the movements of others through our mirror mechanisms, and
cinema holds us at this primal level. But where then is cinematic specificity to
be found? It is to be located, Gallese and Guerra argue, in the form of liberated
embodied simulation. Moving pictures allow us to transcend the simulation
scenarios available to us through our concrete encounters with real others in
proximate situations, affording us the opportunity to simulate the experiences
of real others in situations remote from us in space and/ or time (in documen-
tary films), and of imaginary others in imaginary places (in fiction films). In
this way our empathic horizons are expanded. But it is not only in terms of
make- belief and remote content that films can liberate our embodied simu-
lative capacity. Films may also expand and enrich our simulative repertoire
through technical and stylistic innovation within filmmaking, as Gallese and
Guerra discuss in relation to the Steadicam and action cameras, as well as
technological innovations at once influenced by and impinging upon cinema,
as in the recent rise of mobile screen technologies.
In their exploration of mirror neurons, and of the embodied nature of bio-
logical cognition, Gallese and Guerra bring to bear two great contemporary
Foreword ix
discoveries on our understanding of cinema. They begin and end their study
by reflecting on cinema in the light of one of the frontiers of contemporary
archaeological discovery: the modern investigation of cave paintings— their
whereabouts, age, character, and functions— a story beginning just a few dec-
ades before the Lumière brothers first public screening, and continuing to un-
fold across the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. The extraordinary images
found in Altamira, Lascaux, Chauvet, and many less well- known locations re-
mind us that behind the modernity of cinema—i ts dependence on technology
that was not invented until the nineteenth century—l ie much more ancient
human impulses: impulses to depict, to imagine, to narrate, to enrapture. This
combination of ancient and modern finds an echo in other aspects of Gallese
and Guerra’s work: contemporary neuroimaging meets the evolved biotech-
nology of the brain on one timescale, and the archaeology of cinema history
on another. In this way, the example of cave art functions as both a model for
research on cinema in its most ambitious form, as well as forming part of the
story of cinema in its broadest scope.
Gallese and Guerra’s project is pluralist—o ne might even say ecumenical—
in character, making reference to a wide range of authors across the history
of film theory, and insisting upon the importance of ‘profitably conjugat[ing]
the experiential dimension’ of cinema with the ‘study of the underlying sub-
personal processes and mechanisms expressed by the brain and its neurons’.
But there is no doubting the book’s particular relevance for the tradition of cog-
nitive film theory. As that label attests, when cognitive film theory emerged in
the mid- 1980s, it bore the imprint of the first wave of cognitive science, with its
emphasis on computation and the human mind as an information processor.
Broadly speaking, cognitive film theory has tracked developments in its parent
domain, by subsequently registering the importance of emotion, embodiment,
and evolution to cognition. The rise of cognitive neuroscience is a key part
of this developing picture. The Empathic Screen is not the very first work of
‘neurocinematics’, but it is among the very first book- length studies, distilling
the results of one of the earliest sustained efforts to apply neuroscientific
methods to the study of film, and to integrate those methods with humanistic
ones. Gallese and Guerra thereby help to forge a third culture, bridging the ‘two
cultures’ of the sciences and the humanities. They emphasize that this project in
the larger sense has barely begun. But as a first step, it’s a pretty impressive one.
Murray Smith