In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

211 9 The Nonplace of Argento: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Roman Urban History MICHAEL SIEGEL FACES IN THE WINDOW Early in his debut film L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage; 1970), Dario Argento presents the following scene: Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante), an American writer living in Rome, while out for an uneventful nighttime walk on an empty street in the modern Flaminio district, witnesses a struggle between a man and a woman through the double glass doors of a brightly lit contemporary art gallery. Sam’s concern builds, and as soon as he sees a knife, he begins to walk across the street, heroically, if mindlessly, drawn toward the luminous space. After a passing car brushes him and knocks him over in his rapt distraction, Sam continues toward the box of light, eventually rushing through the front door into the glass bubble that forms the gallery’s vestibule. Once there, he finds the inner door locked. A low-angle reverse shot from inside the gallery that almost perfectly aligns the camera’s frame with the iron frame surrounding the huge panes of sliding plate glass then reveals that Sam is trapped—vertically and horizontally by the double framing of the vestibule and camera and in depth by two large glass walls. Suddenly, the front door through which Sam had entered slides closed, and his imprisonment is complete: he is enclosed in the diffuse light-space of the vestibule, able neither to enter the gallery to stop the crime nor to flee the scene, and thereby forced to observe a horrific murder unfold from a transparent jail cell. As he gestures wildly in fear, terror, and sympathy for the suffering victim, as he silently screams for the attention of passersby and pleads for the writhing, bleeding woman to persist, Argento forces us to watch Sam watch the terrifying scene unfold through multiple layers of crystal-clear glass. The most striking visual element of this scene is without question the double, transparent walls of glass that trap Sam in the gallery’s entryway (Figure 9.1). 212 | MICHAEL SIEGEL Argento goes to great lengths to foreground them and to exploit the wide spectrum of possibilities inherent in the architectural material of glass here. This scene emphasizes the transparency of glass, its subtle reflectivity, and its visual property of collapsing multiple planes of depth onto one surface. At the same time, however, Argento’s camera also highlights the materiality of glass, that is, its ability to demarcate and segment space by obstructing the passage of sound and bodies. The gallery sequence calls attention to the ways in which glass as a building material paradoxically allows for both the distinct, physical separation and the blurred, optical interpenetration of space. In this scene, glass delineates the spaces of the street, the vestibule, and the gallery interior as architectonically separate, as an opaque wall would. At the same time, however, it links these spaces visually. In doing so, it produces a transparent cell that immobilizes Sam as an observed, observing subject. In one of the few book-length studies of Argento available in English, Maitland McDonagh analyzes the gallery scene in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage as one of Argento’s many self-reflexive references to cinematic spectatorship: Like the movie viewer who sits in a darkened theatre and watches glowing two-dimensional images flicker before his eyes, Sam Dalmas walks along a nighttime street, enveloped in his own cloak of darkness. His attention is engaged first by the light, the light emanating from the art gallery whose glass-paned façade allows it to spill onto the street. Through the glass, framed by the metal strips that define the doors, Dalmas can see figures, flattened and remote. This moving image is tantalizingly incomplete; Dalmas crosses the street to get a better look. It seems that he is about to lose his status as surrogate voyeur . . . that he is about to become part of whatever event is taking place within. But that’s not what happens. Dalmas passes through the first set of glass doors and is trapped: he has been made doubly a spectator. The inner doors keep him separated from the woman bleeding within the gallery while the outer doors set him apart from the action on the street, the action of which he was a part only seconds before.1 This reading of Sam as a stand-in for the cinematic spectator is...

Share