Burning Man: The Burning Sensation (2002)

"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, all-night 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.