A musical silence

This post is based on an academic paper I did some time ago. In summary, I analyzed the opening sequence to Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968); how the use of silence punctured by (hyper-)real sounds makes for a stylistic, audio-visual reflection of film and time. Leone often used sounds, instruments and scores - composed by the incomparable Ennio Morricone - as leitmotifs for his characters which makes them so instantly recognizable and distinct. 

In the opening sequence the three gunslingers steal the station and render it timeless. Through the windmill's repeated, monotone creaking; time's passing (the silence), is anchored opposite progression (the telegraph, the train) and the bombast of man (gun violence); the high breaks of sounds as metaphors for the sudden tragedy. An immutable rhythm in the world, of life and death, that man cannot change.

Owing to the absence of music and dialogue, the silence and rhythm are stretched; resounding and omnipotent in a timeless counterpoint, wherein the audio-visual expressiveness - the hyper-real sounds in a musical synthesis - exist before the word. This constitutes Leone's distinct language in Once Upon a Time in the West. With a melancholic-romantic and existential, time-conscious approach, it becomes a confrontation between the heard and the non-heard, as well as the fleeting and the infinite moment in the representation of the film within the film.