An Introduction to
Making a Scene
Jörg Heiser
(p. 11-13)
The phrase
Fare una scenata, or, in English,
Making a Scene, commonly
designates a public display of emotion—anger, sadness, exuberance—
often involving exaggerated gestures and facial expressions, screaming,
possibly violence against objects or people. In any case, there is no
scene made without an audience. The proverbial couple's fight (a subject
of many comedies and romantic novels and movies, but also “serious”
literature and
auteur cinema) is loud, involves glasses being thrown
against the wall or clothes out of windows and—whether consciously
or not—is usually enacted with the neighbors in mind. Of course
“making a scene” is not least a tourist cliché of Naples, carefully nurtured
by the makers and consumers of popular culture (think of scenes
from a Hollywood movie like
It started in Naples of 1960, with Sophia
Loren and Clark Gable), but also by Neapolitans themselves.
The idea of
Fare una scenata is to take the cliché seriously; to
explore its layers of meaning as a means to understand the relationship
between artistic process and its aftermath in image, object, space,
and audience reaction. Is there an “unwritten contract” between the
artist and his or her audience, regarding what they “deliver,” whether
it's meant to be entertainment, enlightenment, or estrangement? A
good example (and a trigger for the exhibition's concept) of what happens
if that “contract” is broken is an infamous stage performance by
the American comedian Andy Kaufman in 1979. After having asked his
family onto the stage to amateurishly tell jokes or sing, Kaufman suddenly
seems on the verge of tears when the audience reacts with boos and hoots. He starts to sob, and suddenly it's as though he has turned
the tables and transformed his audience into the actual family reunion,
embarrassed by one of its members suddenly disclosing a dark secret
and suffering a nervous breakdown. When he eventually starts hitting
congas to the rhythm of his sobbing, everyone laughs again, as if relieved
that the broken contract has been “healed.” “Making a scene” is
about setting up a conflict in order to bring out the “truth”—or deflect
from the truth!—about a relationship: whether it's between lovers, between
members of different social groups, or between artist and audience.
It is a “hysterical” strategy of problem solving, of consolation—
or of problem producing, of declaring fundamental disagreement. A
good example of that latter aspect is closely connected to the history
of Naples and appears in a scene in Vittorio De Sica's film
The Gold of
Naples (1954), after the eponymous book by Giuseppe Marotta. In the
scene, the Neapolitan actor Eduardo De Filippo gives a group of men
from the neighborhood advice about how to punish a stone-hearted
Duke with the
pernacchio, a Neapolitan expression of contempt, of telling
someone they were the scum of the earth—a buzzing sound made
by placing the tongue between the lips and forcibly expelling air. He
advises the members of the neighborhood to “greet” the duke, every
time he passes by in his car, by calling out his full name—Duca Alfonso
Maria Di Sant' Agata dei Fornai—followed by a collective
pernacchio.
It becomes a revolutionary trumpet call, or rather, the sound of a
monumental, larger-than-life whoopee cushion, as if letting off the air
of the Duke's inflated ego.
The works that were shown in the exhibition run the gamut
of the different layers of meaning in “making a scene.” While there are
no illustrations of the “classic” romantic comedy couple's fight, there are works that—fiercely, or humorously—stage a conf lict that could
“breach the contract” with the audience, or enact hysterical “problemsolving,”
while others subtly visualize and structure within space the
imaginative realm which enmeshes these kinds of interactions.
