Burning Man - The Burning Sensation DVD | Award-Winning Drama Film | Perfect for Movie Nights & Cultural Discussions

Product Description The Burning Sensation will scorch your senses as it takes you into the heart of the Burning Man experience. In 2001 some 20,000+ souls made a pilgrimage to the Black Rock Desert to practice radical self-expression and self-reliance in a temporary, commerce-free community. At the end a 50-foot high, neon-lit, wooden effigy is burned, igniting a wild, tribal, allnight celebration. The world s largest venue for public art, Burning Man has elements of a Vegas acid trip, a nudist colony, a pyrotechnic convention, the Rose Bowl parade, a rave, the Museum of Modern Art, and a Mad Max movie dispersed over the 107 degree desert. The film captures intense footage of several art events as well as interviews with Burning Man organizers Larry Harvey (also co-founder), Crimson Rose and Will Roger who explain how, what started in 1986 as an impromptu Summer Solstice celebration, put on by a few friends at a beach in San Francisco, has turned into a full-blown exercise in city planning and management with a hefty price-tag. This temporary city is the 6th largest in Nevada. Some of the featured art events include Burial In Space by Woodpussy (a group of musicians and pyro-technicians who blast their deceased founder into space in a rocket of their own creation); Nebulous Entity and Futura Deluxe (two large, roving installation pieces engineered using mathematics derived from fields of neural networks, ecological systems and fractals); and a performance artist Dea Million who stages her wedding to America. Review BURNING MAN SIZZLING Burning Man: The Burning Sensation By Todd McCarthy, Daily Variety Chief Film Critic SANTA BARBARA (Variety) An amazing and privileged inside look at one of the few certifiable counterculture events of this thoroughly commercialized age, 'Burning Man: The Burning Sensation'; is a knockout documentary with a renegade personality ideally suited to its anarchic subject matter. Bound to excite the young and the reckless just as it gives respectable citizens pause, Alex Nohe's dynamic account of the annual art/lifestyle bacchanal in the middle of the Nevada desert has the potential to become a hot item on the specialized circuit, especially in campus towns and big-city alternative theaters; in its present cut, it's too raunchy for any mainstream cable outlet. If successful, however, pic could lead, ironically, to the over-popularization and eventual commercialization of the Burning Man event itself. 'Participants Only: No Spectators,' reads the ticket for the freeform rave/happening that's held around Labor Day on forbidding, lunar-like terrain far from anything resembling culture or normal life. 'You get to be whoever you want for a week,' says one observer, and this freedom, combined with the considerable demands of basic survival in such a brutal environment, conjures up a creativity in the post-modern pilgrims that is bracingly original, wacky, ingenious and spontaneous. The 'program' for the week is unplanned, other than that it will conclude on Saturday night with the burning of a 50-foot wooden figure that looks strikingly like the little figurine from 'The Blair Witch Project'. Indeed, there is something profoundly pagan about the gathering, which in its haphazard juxtaposition of high-tech elements and hand-wrought artifacts looks like nothing so much as a manned oasis in a 'Mad Max' film. After rolling in across the sun-baked terrain in a hodgepodge of vehicles and securing their 'lodgings' against the hostile elements, the first thing many of the 24,000 celebrants do is remove their clothes. This divesting of inhibitions creates some great comic relief that is sprinkled throughout the film, including glimpses of a Body Hair Barber Shop where females, in particular, receive some very close shaves; a topless bicycle race featuring women with heavily decorated breasts; a distinctly aroused man indulging in a little spanking episode with a partner; and a Bill Clinton Lotion Dispenser from which nude frolickers can grab a quick spurt of sun block from a lifelike sculpture of presidential privates. On an occasionally more elevated level, the film documents the many bizarre manifestations of performance art/installations that spring up on the lifeless landscape: a homemade rocket launch for a deep-space burial, elaborate geometrical contraptions in which people place themselves at what seems like considerable risk, an extraordinary sculpture made entirely of bones, outstanding lighting displays and a woman who 'marries' the United States in a provocative dance/sex act with the American flag. While organizers admit that there were problems with guns and drive-by shootings some years back, these are said to be a thing of the past. But while no outright violence is seen or referenced, a decided air of danger hangs over the proceedings, and it is this, as much as anything else, that seems to turn on the avid participants, just as it would threaten the wary. Burning Man adherents seem overwhelmingly to be whites in their 20s, with a contingent of aging hippies and a few minorities on hand. By extension, one can surmise that this alternative conclave provides a way for mainly 'straight' people to throw off the constraints of everyday life and create an improvised but momentary community that provides an open forum for 'radical self-expression' and by its very existenc --Daily VarietyAlex Nohe s solidly crafted DV documentary is a straight-faced, mostly hype-free account of what transpired at the 2001 edition of Burning Man, the annual semiimprovised arts festival that has been growing steadily over the past 17 years. Most of the participants seem to arrive with preconceived ideas of appropriate tribal behavior that they proceed to act out. (There s a fairly uniform Mad Max Meets the Summer of Love aesthetic, with copious displays of cross-dressing and public nudity.) Nohe is clearly an enthusiast, but he never comes across as an uncritical propagandist for the messianic chaos-theory rhetoric of founder Larry Harvey, who refers to the festival as an exercise in city planning that organizes itself spontaneously and evolves its own distinctive culture. Nohe makes sure we know that most of the impressive large-scale installations (the ones that inspire photo spreads in Wired) are not spontaneous eruptions at all but commissioned pieces by established artists, paid for by the organizers. There are some beautiful flamelit automated contraptions in this category, like the spidery firebreathing robots erected by the extreme technology art collective Seemen. But the overall vibe is druggy and self-indulgent, like a spring-break orgy for pretentious arts majors. (David Chute) --LA WeeklyNothing quite tops witnessing a penis firework ejaculate into full sparkle. In the end we re all the better for it. But don t get out that pack of smokes just yet. It s best to bask in the afterglow that is 'Burning Man The Burning Sensation', a telling documentary about the counter-cultural phenomenon called Burning Man. Every year, thousands of vision questers kiss the consumer world on its backside and head to the Black Rock Desert in Nowheresville, California, where they form a temporary colony in the hopes of discovering spiritual enlightenment, and allow their inner wild person to be totally free. Radical self-reliance and maximum self-expression is the key to Burning Man and although it smacks of a dirt-poor Vegas on acid trip, it has become a stomping ground for both men and women willing to venture into the land of uninhibitedness. Here, on the desert floor, one s deepest rebirth can happen and in any way one sees fit. By week s end, a climactic event has thousands gathered to watch the burning of a 50-foot wooden man. This uber bohemian orgasmic soiree comes to vivid life in Alex Nohe s 75-minute creative work. Nohe, camera in tow, captures many highlights of the Burning Man event in a lush exhibition that is not easily forgotten. In his director s statement, he calls Burning Man a form of art unto itself, and unlike sculpture, painting, or film, Burning Man is interactive, participatory it s not something you watch, it s something you do, It s a place of fantasy and abandonment. Reckless abandonment, that is. You ve got your Woodpussy rocket and the fire machines of Seemen in one camp, the info-grabbing Nebulous Entity (aliens are out there) in another, and a gal named Dea Million prepping to wed America (yes, the country) in a lavish ceremony. And in between, Nohe s camera takes you into virtually every hook and cranny of the Burning Man retreat things like nude mud baths and a radio-free Burning Man (the station K-FUK), to the blazing demise of a stuffed horse whose breathing life found him galloping along cameras in the film Lawrence of Arabia. The topless bike parade isnt that bad either. Co-founder Larry Harvey erected the event with his friend Jerry James after Harvey s divorce. Harvey suggested they burn a man, a wooden thing about 8- feet tall. It happened during the summer equinox in 1986. What did the man symbolize? His father? His relationship? Himself? Perhaps all those things. Regardless, it became transcendent and by using fire as a powerful tool, the two friends decided to repeat the event every year as a personal holiday and invited anyone who wanted to join. Four years later, they were in the Black Rock Desert, 90 miles from Reno. Ten years ago, the event drew in more than 2,000 people. It s doubled every year since. No money is exchanged in the event barter is totally encouraged. However, Nohe has a capable hand. He s able to weave together an intriguing story, capturing both the heart and brawn of Burning Man. He successfully balances the day and night action at the camp with a series of interviews with Harvey, artist/writer/performer Stephen Raspa, Burning Man site manager Will Roger, Crimson Rose, the administrative manager of Naked Fire Goddess, and many others. While the production quality of the piece doesn t live up to that of, say, "The Cockettes", the vivid documentary that wowed the recent Santa Cruz Film Festival, it s not something that sinks the film. There s just too much to be fascinated by here. By the time the finale rolls around the highly anticipated burning of the Man, Nohe has already won you over. You re no longer just the spectator in the theater. You have somehow become emotionally drawn into the experience on screen. The bottom line? It totally rises to the occasion. --Santa Cruz Good Times