Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Deep Red
1975 · Dario Argento · Deep Red on Sightlines
A camera moves slowly across a tabletop. Marbles. A doll's face with one eye catching the light. Small hard bright things laid out like a child's treasury. Nobody in the film is looking at this table. No character stands over it, no one's glance motivates the shot. Then somebody dies.
Deep Red is full of shots like that, and they are the reason Dario Argento deserves better than the compliment he usually gets (great style, silly plot). Deleuze, borrowing from the Soviet cameraman Dziga Vertov, has a name for vision that belongs to no human centre: the gramme, the camera-eye as one piece of matter among others, perceiving without a perceiver. In an ordinary thriller a close-up is somebody's attention. Here the close-up is the film's own appetite. The objects get looked at the way a predator looks.
And then there are the hands. Argento reportedly shot the killer's gloved hands himself, in nearly every murder. His own hands, in black leather. Deleuze's term for a camera we can feel as a presence, a camera that perceives a character who is perceiving, is the dicisign. Argento makes it literal: the film's most anonymous point of view is occupied by the director's body. The device itself is old giallo furniture. Blood and Black Lace codified the faceless black glove in 1964, and Peeping Tom had already handed the audience the killer's eye in 1960. Argento's contribution is to weld that borrowed apparatus to the film's real subject, which is what you cannot trust about what you saw.
Marcus Daly, an English pianist in Rome, witnesses his neighbour's murder and afterwards cannot stop returning to one detail in the room. He saw it. He cannot get it back. Deleuze, following Bergson, separates two kinds of recognition. Habitual recognition is instant and motor: you see a chair, you sit in it, no thought required, the object is only a prompt for a movement. Attentive recognition begins when that circuit fails, when the object refuses to convert into an action, so you stop, describe it again, and reach into memory for the missing link. Deep Red is a whole film of attentive recognition failing. Marcus goes back to the room. He goes back to the memory. Nothing converts.
This is why the Deleuzian lens earns its place here instead of decorating the film. The standard complaint about Argento is that his plots don't hold. But the plot's failure to hold is the content. In a working thriller a clue is what Deleuze calls a mark: an object that means something because of the chain it habitually belongs to. Dropped glove, therefore owner. Hitchcock, whom Deleuze treats as the last and greatest artist of this logic, built his films on the demark, the object pulled out of its chain, the thing that is simply wrong, which forces the audience to interpret instead of act. Psycho's misdirected point of view is exactly that, and Argento inherited its grammar wholesale. What he does with it is refuse the payoff. The demark in Deep Red never gets folded back into a chain of consequences. It stays an image that has to be read. Deleuze calls an image that has lost its automatic link to action and become legible a lectosign, and it marks the point where cinema stops being about what people do and starts being about what images are.
Argento signs the move by casting David Hemmings. Nine years earlier Hemmings played the photographer in Antonioni's Blow-Up, enlarging a negative past the point where grain gives anything back, finding a body he could not prove. That casting is a wink, and it makes a claim. Blow-Up leaves the evidence in the emulsion, where at least you can go and look again. Deep Red moves it into memory, where you can't. Deleuze describes crystalline description: an image that composes its object and then substitutes for it, so the remembered thing quietly replaces the seen thing. Marcus's memory is not a recording with a gap in it. It is a picture he has been making, and it is wrong.
Underneath all this, the drive. Marbles, dolls, a child's hoard: Deleuze calls part-objects charged with compulsion fetishes, and the world they belong to an originary world, a savage substratum showing through the derived milieu of concert halls and elegant squares. Most giallo treats its psychopathology as plot furniture. Argento films it as geology, which is why the architecture here feels complicit rather than incidental. Goblin's score, their first for him, works the same seam. It doesn't underline the violence. It arrives with its own pulse, often ahead of any reason for it, so the murder happens inside the music rather than the music happening to the murder. Horror has been borrowing that template ever since.
Cutting across everything, Daria Nicolodi plays a reporter who declines to be frightened on cue, sparring with Hemmings at the tempo of 1930s comedy. It should wreck the film. It doesn't, because the banter belongs to the plot and the plot is a decoy. Comedy runs on the surface, where people act. The dread runs underneath, where things get looked at.
What the film did to filmmaking is easy to trace and easy to underrate. Deep Red made the set-piece, not the story beat, the unit of construction: a murder became a composition with its own architecture and tempo, something you remember the way you remember a piece of music. Halloween, Dressed to Kill and the slasher decade took that machinery, the prowling ownerless camera and the killer's hands as a character. Most of them handed the camera back to a person. Once the gliding point of view belongs to the murderer it is motivated again, and the vertigo drains out. The thing almost nobody inherited was the doubt: a film willing to say its own hero looked straight at the answer and got it wrong.
Which leaves a question Argento never quite settles. When the answer finally comes, nobody reasons their way to it. It is seen again, correctly, and the distance between the first look and the last is not information but attention. Is that a solution or a confession? He seems to want both. Watch it again and try this: stop following the characters and follow the camera's own interest instead. Notice how often it stares hard at something no one in the film is looking at. Those are the moments where Deep Red stops being a whodunit and turns into an argument about eyes.
Concepts in play
- two-recognitions — Hemmings' pianist is obsessed with a detail he saw at the murder scene but cannot recall; he keeps returning to the room and to memory instead of converting the clue into action.
- the readable image — 'The whole film pivots on the unreliability of looking' — the decisive image loses its self-evidence and must be deciphered rather than acted on.
- demark — The amnesiac-clue structure inherited from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Psycho's misdirected point-of-view: an anomaly that forces interpretation and never resolves back into a chain of consequences.
- engramme/photogramme — Extreme close-ups of marbles and dolls' eyes, and prowling tracking shots no character in the scene motivates — perception with no human centre.
- dicisign — Argento reportedly shot the killer's black-gloved hands himself in nearly every murder; the camera is felt as a perceiving presence, extending Peeping Tom's killer's-eye subjective camera.
- crystalline-description — The Blow-Up debt made explicit by casting Hemmings: an artist-protagonist who witnessed a murder and misreads his own evidence — the remembered image has substituted itself for what was in the room.
- fetish — Marbles, dolls' eyes and the black gloves themselves, filmed in extreme close-up as part-objects charged with compulsive force.
- originary-world — The 'shocking web of dementia and violence' erupting beneath the film's Roman milieu of apartments and concert halls, with architecture that seems complicit in the violence.