In announcing his status as a young director to be reckoned with, Dario Argento couldn’t have picked a more provocative opening gambit, one that unapologetically, if surreptitiously, seeds his future career into one scene. Witnessing a silent murder attempt in an art museum, protagonist Sam Dalmas (Tony Muante) runs to the aid of the wounded woman, only for the would-be murderer’s ghostly-gloved hand to push a button, trapping him in between the two glass panes in the museum entrance. Neither in the museum nor outside, all he can do is hopelessly watch an imminent demise he cannot even hear. Both of these people do leave the scene of the crime alive, but for the moment, Argento lets us linger in a liminal zone between reality and art, life and death, sound and silence, helpless and unwitting voyeurs to a killing that appears to be posed for him – and painted like an art object for us – but which he can only tenuously interfere in.

Positioned between Mario Bava’s earlier Hitchcock riffs and Lucio Fulci’s (and Argento’s own) later, lurid arias of psychedelic blood, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage also feels like a liminal realm for Italian horror in general. In 1970, Argento was clearly a director poised to move the genre from hell to purgatory, from brutally experimenting with society’s sins to exploring the very limits of narrative consciousness in a miasmic middle-ground. But Bird is not as demonic, nor as speculative, as his imminent, genre-transforming works. He’s still the lizard cleverly stalking his prey, not the shape-shifting chameleon daring us to join him in the abyss of cinematic solidity itself. The opening’s portrait of embroiled masculinity and helpless passivity obviously recalls Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and The Bird with the Crustal Plumage never quite escapes the Hitchcock obsession of the earliest giallos (and the likes of Brian De Palma), nor achieves the infectiously fractal vision of a completely broken world that Mario Bava unleashed with Bay of Blood one year later.

Yet Bird, like many great horror films, is already marvelously holding a knife to its own throat, achieving a kind of perverse self-awareness about its own debt to cinema history and the limits of its moral imagination. This is a film that knows how troubled it is, that senses its own participation in modernity’s foibles all too well. It opens with a man witnessing a helpless woman about to be murdered, framed as an art object worthy of the classics, and it closes with a reminder of just how blind he truly is. If the film, too, is myopic in many ways, it also exhibits the genre’s gleefully cruel ability to remind us that we, after all, are the ones who clicked play. The film, like most giallos, seems like a sledgehammer or a machete. We don’t notice it sneaking up on us with a scalpel, hellbent on disfiguring both its genre and our viewing habits, reminding us of the consequences of our inattention.

The opening, then, begins a film-length jazz riff on viewing and the means by which we view. Argento’s suggestive gestalts invite us to piece together the scene rather than witness it, teasing us with the limits of our ability to reconstruct a world that has been manipulated into opacity for us. Argento’s long-term fascination with the technical mechanics of memory and detection, with fragmented and lying figments of the past and the embattled minds of those who confront the void in parsing it out, emerge nearly fully formed here. A black-and-white print of a painting haunts a museum, but the actual painting, purchased by the murderer and currently of unknown whereabouts, becomes an authentic truth that motivates the killer’s violence and the hunt to resolve that violence, an emblem of a quest for the truth the film gets to work stabbing holes in.

There’s a great bit where the camera, from the perspective of what we soon learn to be the killer, views a news report of a murder blocked by a large crowd. The perspective has to move, to reorient itself, the killer searching for an image of their own malevolent actions that aren’t even easy to view for them. Elsewhere, in a killer later scene, a lengthy chase suddenly reverses who is doing the hunting and who is being hunted without really telling us. More generally, this media-obsessed film moves between audio recording devices and gothic statues as if to juxtapose layers of time, to fold modernity and eternity into each other, to imply a search for eternal truth while hinting that all we really have are the shards of a broken world, any one of which might lodge into your throat if you look too closely.

In this sense, whatever else giallo would become, it really was the demonic offspring of the same mid-century catastrophes that birthed the concurrent Italian experiments of Antonioni, Fellini, and Visconti. Argento’s films would learn to evoke Fellini’s baroque self-destructiveness, Visconti’s opulent rhapsodies of suffocating history, and Antonioni’s alienated ennui. Bird is really a boiled-down and heated-up take on Antonioni’s Blow-Up, tracking an individual’s obsessive attempt to find the truth of an image to the point where he loses his ability to ponder the myopia of his own vision, to see that he can’t see.

In the early ‘70s, some of those directors were busy trying to destroy the world, and others to save it, but Argento’s early work mostly (merely?) wants to engage in sophisticated play. At some level, this means that Bird is still (boldly) coloring inside lines that Argento himself would soon scrawl beyond, within narrative rulesets that would soon prove too narrow for his vision of a psychically unstable world. Its interventions are loosely layered rather than tightly coiled, more filigrees and frissons to enliven the work rather than the skeletal structure of a text reworking the ground on which horror stands.

But it’s the beginning of a beautiful cinematic collapse to come, one that seeds the various subterfuges of a young director who can genuinely be said to have transformed a genre by bending it to his whims and preoccupations. We get the titular presence of an animal MacGuffin that the film admits is so improbable as to be essentially irrelevant, before finally becoming suddenly meaningful near the end. We get an American creative type attempting to rejuvenate their career in the history-laden halls of a Europe obsessed with the past, as direct a metaphor as you can find for aged Hollywood genre tropes – themselves twisted versions of European directors if you go back far enough – in need of a shot in the arm.

Most importantly of all, it delivers an early variation of one of Argento’s soon signature scares, where a character staring directly at the frame moves aside to reveal a startlingly sinister object directly behind them. Only this time, the character will turn to look directly in the direction of the object but remains oblivious because his attention is too focused on a closer object in his hand. When the finale occurs, when the nature of how the film is toying with our own assumptions about who commits violence on whom is exposed, this earlier moment achieves new clarity. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage has been out in front of our face all along, so seemingly superficial and obvious and direct that the thought of having to reckon with the film, to heed its demand that we perceive otherwise, doesn’t even dawn on us until it’s nearly too late.

Score: 8/10