The Taking
Indigenous Peoples
•
1h 16m
Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe • Documentary • 2021 • 76 minutes
This illuminating essay uses film scenes to tell of the forced cultural appropriation of a world-famous landscape. Monument Valley is one of the most recognizable landscapes in the world. Its iconographic use in American Westerns has had a lasting influence on stock photography, advertising, and tourism. The valley has been given mythical significance as an image of a “primitive West” firmly in the hands of white people and meant to be protected from intruders. The fact that Monument Valley is traditional Navajo territory has been obscured in the process. A radical examination of Monument Valley’s representation in cinema and advertising since John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), The Taking scrutinizes how a site located on sovereign Navajo land came to embody the fantasy of the “Old West,” replete with self-perpetuating falsehoods, and why it continues to hold mythic significance in the global psyche.
Up Next in Indigenous Peoples
-
Building on Tainted Soil
Directed by Anneleen Ophoff • Documentary • 2022 • 26 minutes
Augustine, Charmaine and Jim are some of the hundreds of thousands of Native American children placed in residential schools since the 1870s. The United States government funded over 360 boarding schools which systematically destroyed...
-
The Mystery of Chaco Canyon
Directed by Anna Sofaer • Documentary • 1999 • 56 minutes
THE MYSTERY OF CHACO CANYON examines the deep enigmas presented by the massive prehistoric remains found in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico. It is the summation of 20 years of research. The film reveals that between 850 and 1150 A...
-
Last Cab to Darwin
Directed by Jeremy Sims • Drama • With Michael Caton, Jacki Weaver, Ningali Lawford-Wolf, Emma Hamilton, Mark Coles Smith • 2014 • 123 minutes
Rex is a cab driver who has never left the mining town of Broken Hill in his life. When he discovers he doesn’t have long to live, he decides to drive t...
