You may not think you've ever been to Monument Valley, but you almost certainly have. Filmmakers have been coming to this vast sprawl of sunbaked desert on the Utah-Arizona border for more than a hundred years now, so it's been featured in all kinds of movies, among them "Easy Rider," "2001: A Space Odyssey" (in which it did duty as an alien planet), a pair of "Jurassic World" and "Transformers" pictures, and the sadly overlooked "Robinson Crusoe on Mars."

The Valley is best-known, however, for its craggy presence in the classic Westerns of director John Ford, several of which ("Stagecoach," "Fort Apache" and "The Searchers," for example) combined to make John Wayne a major international star from the 1940s well into the 1970s. In Ford's movies, Monument Valley (or a couple square miles of it, adorned with the requisite sandstone pillars and towering buttes) became the embodiment of the American West in the national imagination. This set up a bitter irony, because while Hollywood interlopers were happy to have a cheap place to stage their endless cowboys-and-"Indians" action films, the land on which they were shooting was a part of the semi-sovereign Navajo Nation, and in the Navajo view of the world, that land is held to be sacred.

Swiss documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe has now undertaken to tell this story. It might seem a dry subject for a film — a visit to a large parcel of parched landscape — but the director has brought it to life with generous infusions of desert photography (gorgeous, of course) and commentary by various cultural historians, mythologists and Jungian oracles, some of whom have enlightening things to say. Unfortunately, they also deliver occasional salvos of academic babble about things like "the semiotics of tourism" and expand upon dubious notions such as, "Filming or photography of brown places is a 'taking' — a continual cultural appropriation of the West to tell white stories about brown places."

Philippe's oddest production choice was to not identify any of these people until the very end of the film, which is also when we first see their faces. This makes any attempt to absorb the complex story being told an irritating experience, since we never know who's talking or why we should be listening to them. However, in retrospect, it seems probable that one the movie's more trenchant observations is made by a Cherokee woman named Liza Black, who says, "The West is a white idea entirely generated by a culture industry in the U.S. to tell a particular story of the American past in which whites are heroes, brave and innocent."

This framing of American history has the ring of self-righteous Hollywood smugness. But even a short list of the depravities visited upon Native Americans by white settlers would constitute a terrible tale only by mentioning the 1863 massacre at Bear River, in which the U.S. Army killed hundreds of members of the Shoshone tribe, and were said to have conserved ammunition by bashing in the heads of babies and children; or the 1864 slaughter at Sand Creek, in which white soldiers murdered several hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho as they begged for mercy. (The U.S. Congress promised reparations for this crime, but none were ever paid.) In the context of these horrors, the notorious 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee — in which hundreds of Lakota were machine-gunned to death, some of them women holding babies in their arms — hardly stands out.

Hollywood Westerns have rarely dealt with these horrors — in part because, as one of the off-screen experts in "The Taking" points out, "Hollywood itself is part of the myth of the West." Director Philippe illustrates this with an unusually large (and likely quite expensive) collection of footage from famous movies filmed in Monument Valley over the course of decades. Thus, while we're staring at a familiar expanse of desert at one point, who should come zooming into view but Michael J. Fox, at the wheel of the time-traveling DeLorean in the 1985 "Back to the Future."

This sort of borrowed big-budget action and star power gives the picture a shot of fun beyond the usual restrictions of documentary films. There are also some droll observations. On a day with no Hollywood film crews shooting in the Valley — John Ford is long gone — we see tourist vans lined up on the highway leading to the Visitor Center, and we get a quick pan across rows of Porta Potties and binocular stands. Nowadays, somebody says, "Monument Valley is primarily a place where people go to take pictures of themselves."