Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain (review)

The title of Mark Pizzato's book promises a study devoted to the topic which nowadays gains increasing significance—the way the technology of the new media, sometimes referred to as "the third nature," comes to play a key role in both individual and collective life. It can hardly skip anyone's attention that today the mediated experiences, gathered in virtual reality or by means of various kinds of avatars or fictional figures from more traditional forms of art and literature, take the place of the experiences that were formerly made at first hand or passed down from generation to generation via the oral tradition. Therefore one can firmly posit that our brains have become haunted and dominated by ghosts from theater stages, cinema screens, television, and computer games. These phantoms have started more and more often to serve as the basic foundation for our memories, fantasies, and dreams. However, the description and analysis of the condition of the postmodern, always-mediated "self" provides merely a starting point for a much more ambitious scholarly project undertaken by the author of Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain.

Contrary to what the title of the book spells, Pizzato does not focus on the ghosts from the stage and the screen which haunt or inhabit our minds, determining the shape and the ultimate meaning of our fate. Rather, he treats the human mind as a primary internal stage, on which ghosts appear in accordance with the organic principles and the evolutionarily structured brain, before they migrate outside to enter real theater stages and cinema screens. One could most accurately (and by no means ironically) describe his undertaking as a major attempt at supplementing Charles Darwin's account of the evolution of the human species; supplementing primarily with those survival strategies which we work out not in direct contact with hostile nature but within the realm of cultural artifacts—on the level of symbolic meanings and imaginary worlds. The momentous stage of the evolution described by Pizzato began when the interior theater of our brain enabled us to break free from the confining horizon of the present moment, typical of animals, and let us recall in memory past events as well as anticipate and plan the future. In order to convincingly prove that the survival instinct, commonly regarded as the physiological basis of representing arts, became the major evolutionary force, the author of Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in Brainreaches for the latest empirical and therapeutic theories of neurobiology and evolutionary psychology. Pizzato, giving a lucid account of these scientific theories and making them accessible even to lay readers, looks for material basis of that which cognitive sciences describe only in terms of conceptualizing metaphors and mental constructs. However, there is much more to his book.

At every juncture of his argument Pizzato extends the perspective of his research. He goes in the footsteps of Lacan and ∂iñek in that he links Freud's long-standing conceptualizations of mental reality with detailed analyses of antique tragedy and Shakespeare's plays and their contemporary stage productions and screenings. This approach yields the most valuable results in the chapter devoted to the theme of ghosts in Hamlet, in which Pizzato relies heavily on Stephen Greenblatt's argument developed in his Hamlet in Purgatory. Scrutinizing the postwar screenings of Shakespeare's masterpiece (from Laurence Olivier's 1948 film, through Kenneth Branagh's Victorian version from 1996 to Michael Almereyda's postmodern Hamletfrom 2000) he persuasively demonstrates how over a few decades the cultural image of ghosts and their place in our lives were changing relative to the development of the media and new techniques of image production. A wise selection of examples allows him to prove that in spite of the diversity of styles and poetics, various meanings and differently inscribed messages from antiquity to the postmodern era, one can identify the same images and representations of the "self" and its interaction with Other...