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John Ford on the set
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Stagecoach (1939)
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My Darling Clementine (1946)
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She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)
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The Searchers (1956)
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Back to the Future III (1990)
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Road Runner cartoon
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Forrest Gump (1994)
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Director Alexandre O. Philippe
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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.
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