Preceded by short: Southwestern Ballet (Dan Curry, Kimberly Loughlin, U.S., 1986). Two tourists travel to Mesa Verde, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, pursuing those quintessential sights captured with such finality by nineteenth-century photographers. One traveler is haunted by the disparities between the image and its eroded original, the other is under the beguiling spell of her Viewmaster. This superb work brings us the new West, but is it real or Tri-X? (29 mins) What does the tourist really want? Scott Rankin's intriguing essay The Pure implicitly answers this question by searching the globe for authenticity amid the clutter of contamination. The central subject of this visually immaculate work is not purity per se but rather the reverence paid to the authentic, and most particularly to the culturally authentic. In a sly parody of a PBS "think piece," the narrator appears in sites throughout the world, binding locales together with a complex web that draws on time measurement, tourism, set theory, post-colonial rectitude, and the fabrication of history. The propensity to celebrate pure examples of our own history, such as the simulated spectacle of Williamsburg, Virginia, ricochets off the lionizing of the primitive in which undefiled peoples such as the Yanomami escape the tainted failures of modernity. The Pure suggests that the elevation of authenticity is simultaneously its demise.-Steve Seid (59 mins)