The Taking

 

John Ford on the set

Stagecoach (1939)

My Darling Clementine (1946)

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

The Searchers (1956)

Back to the Future III (1990)

Road Runner cartoon

Forrest Gump (1994)

Director Alexandre O. Philippe

THE TAKING            B+                                                                                                            USA  (76 mi)  2021  d: Alexandre O. Philippe

Even though I have a little fun with John Ford, this intent is also not to trash John Ford.  The intent is not to trash the function of myth.  Myth is important, and the idea, as false as it may be, of this false narrative about the American west, still carries a lot of values that I can relate to.  The crux of it is that we talk a lot about cancel culture these days, and that bugs me a lot.  I would like us to be in more of a context culture.   —Alexandre O. Philippe interview from Moviemaker magazine, January 31, 2023, The Taking Director: Don't Cancel Problematic Westerns 

This is a film that is not at all what you expect, as so many critics simply laud the praise on John Ford and his Western aesthetic, some even describing him as the greatest American director ever, where he is certainly regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers during the Golden Age of Hollywood.  But the director brings a thought-provoking edge to film criticism, exploring the affinity both audiences and filmmakers have with the location of Monument Valley, while also investigating how this affinity had affected those who lived on the land long before filmmakers like John Ford came along, introducing viewpoints not often heard, listed at #9 by Jonathan Rosenbaum in his best films of 2023, The best films of 2023 – all the votes | Sight and Sound.  Alexandre O. Philippe is a Swiss-born American film director who has made acclaimed documentaries exploring the cinematic myths in three horror films, Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), and William Friedkin’s THE EXORCIST (1973), now turning to Monument Valley for his latest inspiration, where everything is up for discussion, including the Valley itself, the Western genre, John Ford, Anthony Mann, as well as Indigenous people and how they were treated in Western movies.  Monument Valley is about the myth of the American West, where a mythic landscape actually engages the imagination in a different way for generations of viewers.  These easily identifiable sandstone formations are identified as “monuments,” something humans erect to remember important times in our history, but these monuments have existed since the beginning of time, something huge, permanent, and sacred, and have come to represent the rugged individualism of the West, becoming, in essence, the quintessential American landscape, serving as a source of inspiration for others, with a vast openness that is uniquely distinct from any European counterpart, offering a glimpse into the unknown.  America was imagined as the New World, where the myth of America is the search for an ideal, and the search for a better life.  Hollywood is part of the myth of the American West, where the myth of Monument Valley comes out of the films of John Ford, making seven Westerns using the infamous backdrops to films that have not only captured the imaginations of notable filmmakers with its epic grandeur, like Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, or Sergio Leone, figuring prominently in Filipino director Kidlat Tahimik’s Why Is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow? (Bakit dilaw aug gitna ng bahag-hari?) (1993), but also successive generations of viewers who have seen these films, including Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), the first film that was entirely shot there, and in glorious Technicolor, THE SEARCHERS (1956), SERGEANT RUTLEDGE (1960), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), where it’s easy to become mesmerized by the panoramic beauty.  This film is about the cinema and visual grandeur of John Ford, while also exploring the use of Monument Valley in film and advertising, exploring the impact of how a fictionalized cinema has captured a view of history that actually supplants in people’s minds the real history that is continually being erased and ignored.  Racism is embedded in American society, where whites and white consciousness-only are at the center of these narratives at the exclusion of Native American history, as Indians are always viewed as a threat from the perspective of white settlers, continually seen as a dark and savage enemy that they must continually fight, with the future of civilization at stake.  According to Liza Black, a member of the Cherokee Nation and author of Picturing Indians: Native Americans on Film, 1941–1960, “The West is a white idea entirely generated by a culture industry in the United States to tell a particular story of the American past in which whites are heroic, brave, and innocent.”  Yet it is not viewed as a mythic landscape in the minds of the Navajo, or Diné people, where Monument Valley epitomizes all the struggles they’ve been through because of the United States, yet that is not what most people see, and that is because of the influence of John Ford and his glorifying romanticization about the West.  In other words, these are implanted memories that belong to the imagination of someone else, as opposed to those who historically lived there.    

Monument Valley is located on the border between Utah and Arizona and is on sovereign Navajo land, the largest and most populous tribe in the country with about 14 million acres, yet it is more known as the location for the continual defeat of Indigenous peoples by Anglo settlers, where the Valley’s significance to the Navajos is completely absent from Ford’s Westerns.  This is the familiar story Americans have grown up with for generations, and the essence of childhood “cowboys and Indians” games.  In the movies, white settlers are constantly besieged on all fronts, where the Indians are always the bad guys.  Monument Valley was simply the theater where these childhood games played out.  In 1939 when Ford filmed Stagecoach, most Americans had never visited or even heard of the place, as there was no paved road through Monument Valley, opening up viewers to a brand new world that had never been seen, like an 8th Wonder of the World, not that different from the ruthless exploitation by the reckless adventure film director Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) depicted in King Kong (1933), known for shooting wildlife films in remote exotic locations, a world where fantasy and fiction outweigh reality.  From a Navajo perspective, “John Ford’s films validate a particular vision of the American past in which white Americans were entirely innocent of genocidal treatment of Native people,” a view that becomes ingrained in generations of people watching his films, yet this was Indian land that was being trampled upon and stolen from them, where they had to be pushed aside by force to make way for the Manifest Destiny advancement of the “white man,” where white humanity is viewed as the only race that matters.  Some may contend that the Western is more of a balance between individualism and community than a matter of conquest, but that takes a blind eye towards the self-serving purpose of Manifest Destiny (Manifest Destiny and Indian Removal) and the forcible removal of Indians from their lands by the military, including a continuing series of massacres (When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of ' ...).  The larger narrative of the conflict between the United States and Native people is also inaccurately depicted, as the movies blend together very different tribes with very different histories, not just Navajo but Apache, Cheyenne, or Comanche characters, yet somehow they all repeatedly congregate in Monument Valley, an area of just five square miles, which has nothing to do with any of the tribal stories they are telling, used as a stand-in for southern Arizona in My Darling Clementine, Texas in the SEARCHERS, and even Oklahoma and Nebraska in Cheyenne Autumn.  Yet it’s so easy for audiences to accept the idea that this place, Monument Valley, can be all these different places, and tell stories of all these different tribes from so many different regions.  Between 1945 and 1967, Navajo families in the Valley worked in the uranium mines, where there was a wholesale disappearance of men who have been wiped out by cancers associated with the uranium.  Similarly, they lost their livestock for the very same reasons.  Navajo people were left without a means of subsistence, leaving them few choices if they wanted to remain there.  One of those choices was to work for wage in John Ford movies, yet none of this is addressed in the mythological landscape, where many Navajo still live without running water or electricity, where the contrast between the grandiosity of John Ford’s epic vistas and the miserable living conditions of those living there is indisputable.  In the Hollywood version of Monument Valley, the Navajo people don’t even exist, as their reality is never acknowledged by either the tourism or the film industries, yet Indigenous people have such a deep, spiritual connection to the land that it is inconceivable to go live someplace else.  The American government’s gross mismanagement of Indian lands and resources have done a tremendous injustice to Navajo people, stealing their gas leasing money through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which only aggravates generations of tremendous poverty, a postwar practice that lingered for more than half a century before a massive legal settlement was reached in 2014 (Navajos to Get $554 Million to Settle Suit Against U.S., the largest ever for a single American Indian tribe). 

Philippe’s cinematic essay deftly scrutinizes how a site located on sovereign Navajo land came to embody the “Old West,” becoming a space pregnant with meaning, replete with self-perpetuating falsehoods, while also explaining why it continues to hold such mythic significance in the global psyche, as Ford’s ability to make Monument Valley look mythical, dangerous, and romantic at the same time, is unparalleled to this day.  With over 100 film clips used, including commercials, cartoons, photographs, and paintings, editor Dave Krahling has done a yeoman’s job stitching these clips together in such a comprehensible manner, with quietly ruminative music by Jon Hegel, along with input from a diverse selection of historians and experts in cultural history from the United States (none are seen on camera), most with Ph.D’s, including Jennifer Nez Denetdale, a specialist in Navajo history and the first person of Diné descent to earn a Ph.D in History, while the biting comments from the aforementioned Liza Black are particularly pronounced, as she’s speaking from a longterm, historical perspective of false, inaccurate, and distorted depictions of Native American Indians.  Western mythology is based upon the idea of expansion and exploration, which simply captures the idea of imagination.  Each time that landscape is photographed, it extends the cultural appropriation to tell white stories about Native places whether you are a filmmaker or a tourist, as it’s a form of “taking,” ripping it away from the source, informed by its use in cinema history, which has defined the history of its representation.  What we see are towering peaks and deep valleys surrounded by empty, lonely, and immense space, a vast wilderness that offers a sense of wonder and sublime beauty, but what triggers its significance, and the only reason we value it so highly, is because of what it has been made out to be.  No one travels there looking for its place in human or geological history, as people have lived there for at least two millenniums, instead it has become a pilgrimage of tourist photography, where there are even places set up for that exact purpose, with people fascinated by its appearance in popular culture.  There is a comprehensive List of appearances of Monument Valley in the media, not just Westerns but other ridiculously unexplored territory as well, including films like Harold Ramis’ NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VACATION (1983), Robert Zemeckis’ BACK TO THE FUTURE III (1990) and FORREST GUMP (1994), or the 1950’s Chuck Jones Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner cartoons, yet also unexpected places like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where it was used it as the surface of an alien planet, and even appears in part of the journey of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969).  These images are associated with the West, Indigenous people, freedom, space, and America, concepts that are totally abstract, yet it is essentially a geological formation of sandstone buttes dating back 300 million years, shaped by ancient seas and sediment deposits.  Landscape is about a process of looking for something, where you can imagine it like you’ve seen in pictures, drawn by what you know from the movies, yet when you see it for yourself what you remember are all the associative memories you’ve encountered before, the deeply personal connections that you bring in the mind’s eye, experienced as if they are in the place itself, yet it’s a vast and empty landscape, where the reality of the place remains elusive.  No other director in the history of the movies has been more indelibly associated with a single location as Ford is with Monument Valley.  While there were others before him that briefly filmed there, Ford made use of it from both a narrative and visual point of view, allowing viewers to immerse themselves into the region for the entirety of the picture, where they could imagine what took place there, conjuring up stories about the Valley in relationship to the people who lived there, who will forever live in our imaginations as if it really happened, where it’s become more real to us than the actual history of the region, which is far removed from what we even want to understand.  According to John Bucher, a mythologist and writer who serves as creative director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, “The public is accustomed to not wanting the truth, you don’t want the truth.  He doesn’t want to be awakened from that myth.”  Some may rationalize this point of view, equating it with political propaganda, suggesting it’s not about John Ford and his perceived limitations, but the poetry that graces the screen, yet both are inextricably linked.