The Taking (2021)

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Siskoid
Monument Valley became indelibly tied to the concept of the American (Old) West through John Ford' western, something explored in full in The Taking. Alexandre O. Philippe uses talking voices (as opposed to talking heads) and plenty of (eventually very similar-looking) film footage to at once celebrate, mock, deconstruct and attack this filmic notion of a West that never really was, but that became mythic through cinema. Experts explain how and why it got into Ford's visual vocabulary (Ford never explained himself, quite the opposite), usually flying in the face of geographical logic, how the images spread to other films, what effect the Monuments have on the viewer's psyche, etc. But the film also airs Native voices who speak of a certain kind of cultural appropriation-turned-perversion, using the space to tell white stories and distorting Native ones. The doc's title starts to make sense. While I am not a Ford fan (largely because he kept casting the Duke, a screen presence I very rarely can stand), I still found the film theory nitty-gritty and mytho-psychological discussions fascinating. My one criticism might be that I'd have liked to know who I was hearing from before the credits. 3 weeks ago