Deconstructing the heroic folklore of the cinematic Old West, director Alexandre O. Philippe’s latest essay-film is rich in ideas and images, even if it veers towards arid semiotic analysis in places. Following well-regarded documentaries on Alfred Hitchcock and George Lucas, The Exorcist (1973) and Alien (1979), Philippe turns his exacting gaze on western iconography in The Taking, specifically the towering sandstone skyscrapers of Monument Valley on the Arizona/Utah border, a much-mythologised location that has provided the majestic backdrop to countless American frontier fables.
Screening at Munich Film Festival this week after a generally positive launch at various U.S. fests, Philippe’s deceptively prickly rumination on nationhood and identity is a visually ravishing collage of archive clips, newly shot footage and highbrow academic background commentary. With clear appeal to cine-literate festivalgoers, The Taking should also find a discerning audience in the wider world, not least among film historians and cultural studies classes. Its brisk 76-minute running time is arguably a little thin for such rich subject matter, but should at least make it a smooth fit for TV documentary slots.
Thanks largely to pioneering directors like John Ford and Anthony Mann, Monument Valley became the definitive widecreen canvas for hundreds of western movies. But Philippe shows how it has also served a much broader screen universe, from sci-fi to comedy, from cartoons to car commercials. Besides a wealth of classic cowboy movie scenes, The Taking includes clips from films as diverse as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Electra Glide in Blue (1973), National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), Back to the Future: Part III (1990), Forrest Gump (1994), Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) and more.
The seven westerns that Ford shot in Monument Valley, most starring John Wayne, were crucial in shaping the landscape’s iconic screen image and are central to The Taking too. Philippe chronicles how films like Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) reconfigured the Valley’s topography to create a fictionalised inner landscape, even recasting Arizona as Texas for The Searchers (1956). The unseen academic talking heads whose words underpin Philippe’s images have a field day deconstructing Ford’s films as rich socio-political texts, drawing parallels with the rugged Irish coastline woven into the director’s ancestral DNA, and claiming that he “built us a sort of mental West” with his alluring fantasy of wide-open frontier freedom. Interesting angles, but all eminently arguable.
At times these unseen theorists risk straying into pretentious overreach. Comparing the emotional footprint of Monument Valley to the Dallas street where JFK was assassinated in 1963, or the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters in 2021, feels fanciful. Clumsy parallels with the death camps of Auschwitz are just tasteless. Meanwhile, all this high-end analysis is amusingly counterpointed by Ford himself in recurring clips from a vintage interview in which he disdainfully brushes away more intellectual takes on his films with blunt, monosyllabic answers.
Even so, pop culture is inherently political, whatever its authors may themselves intend. And this more racially charged dimension produces some of the sharpest, strongest material in The Taking. Because Monument Valley is on sovereign Navajo land (or Diné, to use the more recently favoured term), several of the film’s background commentators frame the area’s cinematic history as a massive, ongoing act of cultural appropriation. While Ford was fabricating heroic cowboy fantasies here, employing Indigenous locals as extras, the Najavo Nation was still reeling from centuries of military colonisation, dispossession, incarceration, poverty, perilous work in uranium mines, and more.
“This is not a mythic landscape for Navajo people”, notes one of the commentators, Liza Black, a Cherokee Nation citizen and author of Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960. The cinematic Old West, she notes, “is a white idea entirely generated by the culture industry in the United States to tell a particular story of the American past in which whites are heroic, brave and innocent.” One of the main cinematic purposes of Monument Valley, Philippe concludes, has been to “tell white stories about brown places.” An elegant blend of beautiful mythology with ugly historical reality, The Taking is an easy watch with some hard conclusions, celebrating the comforting legends of the American West while methodically tearing them to pieces.
Venue: Munich Film Festival
Director, screenwriter: Alexandre O. Philippe
Producer: Kerry Deignan Roy
Cinematography: Robert Muratore
Editor: Dave Krahling
Music: Jon Hegel
Sound design: Phillip Lloyd Hegel
Production company: Exhibit A Pictures (US)
World sales: ICM Partners
In English
76 minutes
