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MeIn 1986, a group of starving artists seeking relief from financial hardship built an enormous statue, dragged it to San Francisco’s beach and burned it as police and passers-by watched in disbelief. Forty years later, Burning Man is the festival to end all festivals – a spectacular display of music, art and performances that draws tens of thousands to the Nevada desert every summer for community, catharsis and spiritual connection. It is a journey of Bohemians and billionaires, a commentary on some of the problems of woo-woo hipsterism, an anti-cultural organization that struggles with the contradictions between its libertarian goals, corporate reality and the constant presence of lightning figures such as Grover Norquist, the conservative genius, and Elon Musk.
The only way to understand the meaning of this place, it seems, is to take the trip – figuratively at first, and then immerse yourself once in the psychedelic Black Rock City, every culture. “It’s so fascinating that it seems impossible to film or describe what it feels like to be inside a city that exists for a week, that is imagined, built and supported by the people inside it,” says Jehane Noujaim, co-director of The Man Will Burn, a new documentary that premiered. HBO this month during the festival.
Noujaim, who gained notoriety for his Al Jazeera documentaries about the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the NXIVM cult, did not want to chronicle Burning Man’s steampunk world. His interest came when he was trying to explain what he had shot at The Great Hack festival, his documentary on the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which used a photo showing one of the whistleblowers in a makeshift temple at the site. “I spent about eight months trying to get permission to use that shot – a very long time to shoot, which is crazy,” he says. “I didn’t know Burning Man had a CEO or a board.”
Once well-informed and trusted, Noujaim learned of the film history the festival had built in secret since its early days in the hope that an independent filmmaker might change it one day. Carrot was enough to pull him in and bring in Vikram Gandhi, the filmmaker behind Barry and Kumaré, to come on board as director. Their collaboration led to a four-part public awareness campaign, following the unique experience of Burning Man as the festival faces Covid, board attacks and the effects of global warming.
Noujaim and Gandhi frame Burning Man as a love story between Larry Harvey, a protest artist who saw the future of the festival when it was still a small gathering of Bay Area eccentrics, and Marian Goodell, his long-time friend and right-hand man who carried the vision forward as the festival’s CEO since Harvey died at the age of 70 due to complications from a stroke in 2018.
Spectators meet Goodell as he grapples with the decision to cancel the festival for the second year in a row due to the pandemic. Kimbal Musk, who is on the Burning Man board, does not see his warning as a strategy but as a way to change the leadership, rallying a group of disaffected members to his cause. People who go to their festivals, meanwhile, weigh the risk of joining a terrorist group that wants to return to the desert regardless of the consequences, or stay at home when Burning Man coincides with the real age.
For the organizers of Burning Man, it seemed like the worst time to have cameras around – and several times they told the filmmakers that there wouldn’t be much to shoot because the festival wouldn’t happen. But Noujaim and Gandhi pushed for access. “It was a very important time to try to understand where these places were and why so many people around the world cared about them so much that they could go through the epidemic and still go after it,” Gandhi says. “When we started shooting at the gang fire, we didn’t know if it was going to be a success or another Fyre Festival.”
Decommodification, greater inclusion and social responsibility are some of the guiding principles of Burning Man. Since the beginning of the 1900s, the festival has been held in Black Rock City, a semicircular area 100 miles from Reno that is built and demolished without inspection every year – “swept away in the first big wind”, as the founder of the honor Harvey puts in the doc. But it’s the spiritual practices that the festival seems to have with long-time pilgrims that can make commitment seem like fraud to outsiders – so much so that Burning Man claims on dating history are taken as a red flag.
“My first film was about me becoming a religious leader and starting a fictional religion,” says Gandhi, referring to Kumaré. “All the ideas I had in making this film were about creating a story, a myth of creation, some kind of sanctuary, not laws but teachings – all of these are very similar to what Harvey created for Burning Man.
There is much to admire in the main tent of Burning Man: peaceniks in communion and gun nuts. Google co-founder Sergey Brin is taking over the chow hall at rush hour. Norquist, one of the architects of the low-income economy, praises the benefits of Black Rock City’s cashless exchange system. “The first day I was there filming, I sat by the fire next to the head of the team I interviewed for my film Control Room about Al Jazeera,” says Noujaim. However, a society built around so that everyone can find their own truth leaves a blind spot.
For all the human nature of Burning Man, they’ve struggled to escape the emotions — and reality — that it takes especially for white people who have the time and means to take a weekend off around Labor Day to reconnect with their inner child on the playa. The film makes a counterpoint to that notion, following a black ex-paratrooper on a trip to Burning Man to deal with his PTSD. However, all the talk of community, gifts and inclusion doesn’t end on the way home, with the first hot shower. The experience on the playa has become more sophisticated – backpackers carry items in expensive tents while A-listers and influencers drop thousands on air-conditioned RVs with all the trappings of a luxury spa.
Even the non-profits behind Burning Man are starting to look like money to festivalgoers who look at its $60m operating budget and sprawling real estate and wonder how high ticket prices can go. this wealth. In the end, Black Rock City seems like another casualty, a quicksand for cosplayers to do fantasy that won’t fly in their community. “It’s almost like Burning Man has gotten expensive because the world they are expensive,” says Gandhi. But I agree that things have changed and money has become a big part of it.
The Man Will Burn could have shown more scandals at the festival to attract viewers who are now hoping for a documentary. only entertainment: struggle for power, nakedness and use of madness, wanderers who died in the desert; a storm that turned the playa into a mudflat and had cable news viewers begging to save the world. Instead, Noujaim and Gandhi offer a positive and appropriate view of the festival and its timing – which will inspire Fomo in some and leave others feeling like they’ve experienced Burning Man enough without going.
A long, unusual trip would be worth going either way. “One of the things that’s really interesting is that you don’t see a lot of things going to the same things only it is there for a week and then it is burnt,” says Gandhi. Or you can think of it as a very rare tradition in the world that may not be part of them. But we don’t really have anything like that. This is just an event of the event, for a to hear.”
