Dario Argento's fascination with the act of seeing, in terms of both perception and memory, and his stylistic execution of this interest set him apart from most other horror directors.  He often toys with our limited perspective as the viewer by burying clues and evidence in the most unlikely of places on the screen, yet, in retrospect, we realize they were always clearly right in front of us.  With his greatest film, Deep Red, he expands on this technique by making his protagonist the surrogate for the viewer, not only with point-of-view shots, but through his struggle to remember the most minute details of the murder he witnessed.  Argento has two games playing at once, which mirror and play off one another - the first between our own inability to focus on and parse through all of the visual information and his own God's eye view and the other between Marcus and the villain.  Form and content are not merely in harmony - they're one and the same and even the film's most thrilling and suspenseful moments are carefully framed or revealed in a way that reflects our own fragmented perception of the reality presented.

It is no coincidence that Argento cast David Hemmings as the lead here as Argento tackles similar themes as that other famous Hemming's vehicle, Antonioni's Blow Up, in terms of how the protagonist's comprehension of their own memories and reality itself are seemingly in a constant state of flux.  As much as I like that film, Deep Red is more impressive for seamlessly weaving genre conventions with the formalist techniques of the art film.  The final act is particularly impressive in dealing with these seemingly incongruous concerns when Marcus visits an abandoned mansion to search for clues.  The editing becomes increasingly fragmented, often shifting between POV shots and long shots from around the corner or above him, giving us the sense of watching and being watched.  The tension is developed not by cheap scares, but through its central thematic concerns.  When he scrapes off pieces of the wall to reveal a painting underneath and later breaks through different walls to discover what's behind them, it reflects our own attempts to delve into the three-dimensionality that lies within the two-dimensional screen we're viewing in order to uncover the depth of meaning the lies within.  It is through Argento and Marcus's endless fascination with exploring the intricacies and complexities of their environment (and their experiences within and memories of them) that the film so remarkably succeeds at conveying the frustration and obsession with bringing memory and truth together.  And what better way to present this than forcing us to consciously go through it ourselves?