SCREENING IN THE BERNARD OSHER FOUNDATION AUDITORIUM
“Successful in demonstrating the way in which Monument Valley has become a canvas onto which the public can superimpose their own ideas and myths.”
76 minutes. Not Rated. Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe. In English and Italian with English subtitles.
Note: This screening will be preceded by a 2-3 pm panel discussion juxtaposing John Ford’s extensive use of Monument Valley as a backdrop for his movies to evoke ideals of freedom with the realities of the Navajo people. Filmmaker/critic Scout Tafoya will introduce the 3 pm screening.
For more information on the John and Francis Ford Film Festival, or to purchase tickets for the two-day symposium held at the Portland Museum of Art, visit the festival website. Tickets for individual films on Sunday, August 20 can be purchased through the “Get Tickets” link above. PMA members can utilize the code PMAxFORD23 to receive 25% off entry to this two-day symposium.
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.