In 1983, Telluride Film Festival co-founder Tom Luddy took Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky on a road trip. Tarkovsky’s film *Nostalghia* was going to screen at the event. They drove from Luddy’s home in Berkeley to Telluride by way of Monument Valley, the expanse of desert belonging to the Navajo Nation and famous for grand sandstone buttes that stand alone like statues on its floor. The site was used over and over again by Hollywood to evoke the distinct atmosphere of the American West: director John Ford used the valley as the location for ten Westerns; John Wayne played the hero there six times. Yet as Tarkovsky traveled through the Southwest, he was disappointed. The houses built of “slats, planed boards and plywood” that he had thought were poorly-built Hollywood stage sets, he saw, were really the dwellings of Americans. “Toy towns and the splendid steppe,” he wrote of the trip.…