Regular $15/ $11 Matinee
Member $11/ $6 Matinee
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.
As a future war between the human race and artificial intelligence rages on, ex-special forces agent Joshua is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI.
While researching a new drug, Dr. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) stumbles on a potion that can make him invisible.
A woman is suspected of her husband’s murder, and their blind son faces a moral dilemma as the sole witness.
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