The empathic screen. Cinema and Neurosciences

At the beginning of 2000 I made a film-document entitled "Apoplexia Cerebri". It was about the experience of working with sensitive actors and, in the presentation sheet, I was writing: “Ah! if a mechanical eye already existed inside the human eye, right next to the brain, vision and thought side by side, pour reformed the shape of the truth in real time! Without posts, without assembly that isn't already – Imago in érgon.”. After reading “The liver screen. Cinema and neurosciences” by Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra all those thoughts, which seemed to arise from the single and shapeless desire to get rid of technique and language and get straight to the point, they all reappeared. Precise, punctual and updated by new research, discoveries, feedback. Fifteen years later, a neuroscientist and a film historian, in extraordinary sequence of critical thinking, they have reopened major questions that call into question various clichés about the body, image, brain; consequently on art, on philosophy, on psychology, on psychoanalysis, on science. It is a book that pushes towards the future, in the last chapter “End of the screens?” viene citato Spielberg che dice “we’ve got to get rid of that”, that is, we must get rid of every screen or monitor and bring the viewer into the experience, beyond the screen. Come Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr., spectator who penetrates the screen and experiences the scene, spect/actor! This is being done with GoPro cameras? Or video games, with the most advanced 3D or holography, with the touch-screen… a mechanical eye inside the human eye, right next to the brain. Francesco Pititto

Speeches and book presentation| Vittorio Gallese, Michele Guerra

Treatment | Francesco Pititto, Valeria Borelli.