Hearing and Seeing with Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968): Toward Dispelling Audio-Visual Hierarchy

The conventional cohabitation of cinematic sounds and their implied sources engenders a close and cooperative partnership between the senses of hearing and sight in the process of experiencing film. In this article, I explore the effects of film sounds that become separated from their sources. Specifically, I will argue that audio-visual dislocations create a rift within the intersensory relationship and invoke an anxiety-driven process aimed at mending the partnership by visually locating the source of the sound.