The Unburied: Material Histories of Film in the Owens Valley
By Genevieve Yue for MUBI | Notebook Magazine

The Owens Valley, a slender stretch of high desert in Eastern California, is a place of origins. It has played a major, if underrecognized, role in the industrial development of Los Angeles, particularly for the silver extracted in the late 19th century and the water diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct in the early 20th. These and other histories have been inscribed, though often miswritten, in film, including in the nearly 500 Hollywood productions shot in the region’s Alabama Hills. But look closer into these beginnings and one will find traces of the lives and labors of dispossessed Indigenous peoples, Mexican settlers, and Asian immigrants.