English: In 1995 some friends invited me to Burning Man. I thought it was an overnight rave, so I grabbed a backpack with a change of clothing and my Super8 camera. It wasn't until we entered Nevada that I realized I was going to a week-long festival in the desert. With no food or shelter, and minimal supplies, I lived off the kindness of friends and strangers.
We were a part of the Wicked Sound System dance community, bringing the first DJ sound system to the event. At that time, the music selection at Burning Man was very diverse with live bands (many acoustic) and performance artists dominating the entertainment. Following the first all-night Wicked party, we were asked to move our camp far away so people could sleep—a notion that seem ridiculous today. In 1995, less than 4000 people attended Burning Man, and the event was situated in the very center of center of Black Rock Desert, unlike today where it sits in the corner of the playa (desert). The general lack of rules and boundaries made it an interesting experiment in anarchy and unbounded freedom.
This film is unedited—straight from the camera. I only brought two 3.5 minute rolls of film with me (one color and the other black and white), so I rationed film by capturing scenes with short recording—I thought of it as capturing moving photos. I cut out some under-exposed night footage, but the rest is how I shot it. The music is from a favorite 1995 chillout album by Subsurfing called Frozen Ants.
Additional stories can be found at qaswa.com/burningman
to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to remix – to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0CC BY 3.0 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 truetrue
This file, which was originally posted to Vimeo: 311787231 (view archived source), was reviewed on 12 July 2021 by the automatic software YouTubeReviewBot, which confirmed that this video was available there under the stated Creative Commons license on that date. This file should not be deleted if the license has been changed in the meantime because Creative Commons licenses are not revocable. The bot checks only the license, human review is required to check if the video is a derivative work, has freedom of panorama related issues and other copyright problems that might be present in the video. Visit Commons:Licensing for more information. If you are a license reviewer, you can review this file by manually appending |reviewer={{subst:REVISIONUSER}}to this template.
Captions
Add a one-line explanation of what this file represents