Burning Man Festival - Special Edition
by Joe Winston
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DVD details
Director: Joe WinstonProducer: Joe Winston
Writer: Joe Winston
DVD: Region Code 0
Format: NTSC
Running Time: 90 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-10-19
Studio: Ow Myeye Productions, Inc.
DVD Reviews of Burning Man Festival - Special Edition
DVD Review: Joe Winston's Burning Man Festival films
Summary: 5 Stars
The primary strength of both the compelling films contained on this DVD is what it avoids, its strength to resist temptations common to other film of its like. Mr. Winston's doc manages to construct an organic flow of scenes while still resisting the urges to dribble out a stream of consciousness rendition of typicality of the Burning Man festival or offering a definition of what the festival "means". Neither approaches would have hit the point since, as this doc has shown me, the Burning Man seems more about a free spirited communal gathering than an opportunity for unique individual experience, more of a chance for open ended discovery than some sort of pre-conceived "defining experience".
Joe Winston spends most of the time following the various characters he encounters, whether they are clad in creative and decorative costume, driving their flamboyant cars, or just running around stark naked with well placed shiny tassels. People indulge in everything from making love in public to firing automatic weapons at patches of dirt, and somehow manage to make both equally innocuous and free-spirited. He also discusses current and past experiences of the festival with these characteristic festival-goers, as well as the history and ideas behind the festival with the founder, a Mr. Larry Harvey.
The second short film combines elements from the first with a more personal narrative that also takes as its task the portrayal of the filmmaker and his friends in their journey to make it to and live through another Burning Man Festival. Except this time they are determined to add to the diversity of creative venues. They construct a 1-Minute of Fame booth that couples 1 minute of recorded enclosed privacy with the open-ended impetus to create yourself, and the Couch Potato Camp, a home-base where anyone can relax on a couch, crack open a beer, and watch some TV. Both of these experiments produce notably interesting results, and end up schematizing well into conventions used for constructing the film itself.
Perhaps the most gaping flaw of both films is their brevity, which may leave the viewer not wondering what "goes on behind closed doors" or something similar, but that the full diversity of creative expressions for each respective festival is hardly exhausted by the film's coverage. Hopefully this compels you to attend a Burning Man festival (especially before its increasing popularity potentially blows it open into a different beast), but perhaps it just makes you want to stay far away from Black Rock City, Nevada.
DVD Review: Fascinating look at Burning Man - highly recommended
Summary: 5 Stars
These films are an exciting look inside a unique event. Interviews and documentary footage let the viewer experience the diverse, free-wheeling creativity and community that make the Burning Man festival so special. I especially appreciate the filmmaker's contribution: the minute of fame booth. Winston and his friends built from scratch a small booth where people did or said anything they wanted for one minute, and each evening held public a showing of the day's recordings. The addition of an interactive, quick-turnaround video project was a great angle on the collaborative nature of the festival.
The film captures the sublime as well as the mundane of the Burning Man festival: the ecstatic naked mud dancing, drumming, art cars, playing a giant instrument made of 20 pianos, the other-worldly dry, cracked earth. But sometimes it was just *hot*. The daily struggles to stay cool and caffeinated are also covered in all their humor and normalcy.
Interviews with fellow revelers showed a fascinating diversity of perspectives on the same festival. One woman describes Burning Man as a utopian seed for a better society; a naked man says the festival means, "nothing at all, it's just a good time." Someone else is hesitant to have faith in anything, including the festival, "because of the backlash of the way the left betrayed itself in the 60s." Highly recommended.
DVD Review: Charting The Evolution of Black Rock City
Summary: 5 Stars
FIRST OF ALL, A MESSAGE FOR ALL VIRGINS:
90% OF WHAT GOES ON IN BLACK ROCK CITY IS UN-FILMABLE. IF YOU WERE TO GET YOUR HANDS ON EVERY FRAME OF EVERY MOVING-PICTURE EVER SHOT AT BURNINGMAN, YOU WOULD STILL BE ONLY 10% EDUCATED ON WHAT OCCURS THERE. MY PERSONAL ADVICE TO YOU IS TO STOP BUYING DVDs AND BUY A TICKET! GO FORTH AND DOCUMENT, AND BE DOCUMENTED! UNMEDIATED, UNPRECEDENTED EXPERIENCES AWAIT YOU!
That said, I would highly recommend this DVD to any and all burners who are interested in catching a glimpse of the early days. It was a very different desert back in '94, and this is the only doc in the bunch that dates back that far. The documentary reveals a Black Rock City that, from today's standard, was really something more like a Black Rock Hamlet-- harboring an elite population of only a few thousand. The event was just four days. There was no printed schedule.
The camera explores: sculptures, costumes, artcars, duststorms, breasts, freaks, breasts, weirdos, penises, double rainbows, breasts, mud orgys, and other familiar sights confirm that we have indeed arrived at the right desert, but other sights mark this Burningman as an unmistakably primitive manifestation of what we see in 2007. There is no designated entrance gate, `playa' area, nor is there an official temple. People just camp in a closed circle around the Man, and every patch of unoccupied desert remains fair-game for art installations, gun-shooting, lovemaking, and getting lost. There is less to do, and fewer blinking lights to stare at, but there is definitely a stronger sense of anarchy (for better or worse) and less of a consensus of 'alternativity'.
One of the most dramatic scenes follows the filmmakers as they attempt to lead some latecomers back to the festival from the road, but instead manage to get an entire caravan lost in the whiteness of the Black Rock Desert. Although the kernel of the freedom that is still felt at Burningman remains preserved in the great bounty of empty space, this kind of transcendent danger has become less and less common, as the ingrown dangers of large crowds force organizers to gradually build more infrastructure.
This year's theme was "The Green Man". The theme for 2008 is even more grandiose: "The American Dream". Along this trajectory, it would make sense if the 2009 theme were "Global Man", and 2012 turned out to be "Local Man", confirming the rumors that the festival infrastructure cannot (or will not?) sustain a population of over 40,000. It is unclear whether the future of an ever-growing Burningman will have no choice but to become a local one.
Yet in 1994, most participants, including the filmmakers, seemed oddly unaware that their little get-together would be destined to grow ten-fold in fourteen years. One couple even proclaimed to the camera, "It's too big, you should've come when we first heard about it." The single participant that attempts some perspective (as he seems to do in every Burningman doc) is the inevitable, inimitable Larry Harvey:
"In our experience, every time a new little piece of culture turns up, the whole mass consumption operation turns it into a commodity and destroys it... It used to take about five years, now it takes about five months. But if you reverse that process, and unleash the creative power of culture, you will find that --like a blade of grass that buckles pavement-- that it has an overwhelming force."
Whether or not Burningman will contain itself to Nevada, or scatter into thousands of local burns, the undeniable popularity of this event can only increase, as long as it stays true to its core principles: No money. No advertising. No trace.
Description of Burning Man Festival - Special Edition
This Special Edition includes two movies, previously released on VHS as "The Burning Man Festival" and "Burning Man: Just Add Couches." Together, these documentaries provide a vivid tour of America's largest countercultural event, held each summer in the barren Nevada desert.First, we tour the temporary city revelers build for a weeklong celebration, which culminates in the burning of a forty-foot tall human effigy. Celebrants dress in costumes, strut naked, dance in the nude, create religions, race in rocket-powered cars, shoot automatic weapons, or do whatever it is they don't get enough of at home.
In the second installment, the filmmakers return to Burning Man. "What this party really needs is a comfortable living room setting, where people can watch TV and drink beer," they proudly declare.
The group's hilarious misadventures building "the Couch Potato Camp" shed light on the experience of participating in this unique festival.
Exclusive DVD extras include 30 of the 1,000 recordings made in the Minute of Fame Booth at Burning Man.
From the Director
I'm pleased to finally release these two documentaries together, as they were meant to be seen.
About the Director Joe Winston, a filmmaker who lives and works in Chicago, is probably still best known for the TV series, "This Week in Joe's Basement," which transcended its venue on public access cable to become a critical and popular success. "Joe's Basement" won two local cable TV awards and was featured on NBC's Today and Jenny Jones shows, MTV's Day in Rock, BBC's World of Wonder and PBS's Image Union and The 90s. Joe also has a couple of sho eboxes filled with very strange fan mail.
This product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
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