The Sound of Horses

Video essays combine the visual and the aural, both in their form and in their way of analysing movies. This video essay for MUBI is a great example. It compares two John Ford westerns, starting from the observation that the (visible) peaks in these movies’ audio waveforms fall at around the same moment on their timeline.

 

Will Ross then delves further into the parallels and differences between the soundtracks of Stagecoach (1939) and My Darling Clementine (1946), making insightful remarks about their use of music, sound perspective and auditory saturation. The way Ross connects the changes in sound design to Ford’s battlefield experiences during the Second Word War is particularly captivating.