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. This talk focuses on the latter group: Chinese miners killed in a devastating accident at the Cerro Gordo mine, Japanese-Americans interned at Manzanar, and the minor characters that, through their background expressions in films, point to a different direction for the Hollywood imaginary. The history of film, in its most basic, material composition of silver nitrate, is conditioned by these half-buried figures, however incidental they have been to an already neglected landscape. As the experience of “film” has become all but entirely digitized, the retrieval of these foundational elements of the film image reveals a representational form whose geographical and material origins are still largely unexplored.