PRODUCTIONS: BURNING MAN

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Raffaella Maresti

SD Cinematografica

60'

SD

"Burning Man" one of the strangest meetings of the United States and the West, is a festival which began with a few intimate friends on the Californian coast, and in the space of a few years, transformed itself into an extraordinary success.
It was 1986 when Larry Harvey, landscape architect, on the day of the Summer solstice, got together a few friends on the beach of San Francisco, and made a crude male figure with pieces of waste wood, and set it aflame. "It burned like the sun." records Harvey, "And everyone around came running to see it, converging upon the scene as if by instinct."
We're now this year at the 14th edition. B.M. takes place on the 28 August and the 4th September, on the sandy bottom of an ex salt lake of Nevada, where there grows up a strange village of tents, and streets of gas lights, post-offices and a commissary. But only for one week. At the centre of the village, there's B.M. the statue symbol which is now 16 metres high, and illuminated at night time by futuristic neon tubes, which is burned the first Sunday of September, at the end of the meeting.