How John Ford's West Was Framed: Landscape and Geography in the Monument Valley Films

Film theorists characterize the cinematic landscape as an autonomous spectacle that overwhelms spectators' absorption in a film's story. Yet Hollywood's most famous landscape, Monument Valley, first gained prominence in exemplars of classical narrative cinema. This article examines John Ford's Monument Valley films through an alternative form of analysis of the landscape as the combination of discrete elements of mise-en-scène rather than an autonomous image. It situates the films in relation to the valley's identifiable geography to consider the director's broader visual strategies. Ford's landscape manifests itself in subtle background details that accumulate and reinforce his westerns' broader thematic concerns.