Known for The People Vs. George Lucas, Doc Of The Dead, 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene, Memory: The Origins Of Alien, Lynch/Oz and the 2023 SXSW hit You Can Call Me Bill, award-winning cinema historian Alexandre O. Philippe turns his lens on Monument Valley in his documentary The Taking opening in theaters on May 5th.

The Taking, the new cinematic essay from film documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe, uses the history of cinema 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.