Spark: A Burning Man Story

I've always said the best documentaries take you into a community that is new to you, possibly even strange or comical, and by the end you feel like understand the people in it and why they do what they do.

I can't say as I got that feeling out of "Spark: A Burning Man Story," which looks at the annual party-slash-community that springs up in the Nevada Black Rock Desert every year. But I at least felt some appreciation for the devotion to artistry and togetherness that seems to animate most of the organizers.

As for the attendees? Yeah, I think most of them are just coming for a big ol' hedonist party. Burning Man, named for the eponymous wooden statue that is built and incinerated every festival, is famous for its lack of inhibitions and clothes, and surfeit of drugs and sex.

Take Jon, a gay man from Texas who is the chief of one of the "camps" -- themed structures that are like mini-theme parks at the fest -- that is basically just one non-stop rave called PlayaSkool. He enjoys dressing up in wild outfits and strutting about as the king of the walk.

Burning man's 10 tenets that everyone must adhere to is basically a hippie manifesto: no money, only bartering; bring everything when you come, leave nothing when you leave; radical inclusion, etc. You can quickly see that some of the camps follow some of the principles well, and others get swept under the rug.

In the last half-hour or so, directors Steve Brown and Jessie Deeter basically just give us one long travelogue of the 2012 Burning Man, and I admit it got rather old rather fast. I liked looking at the cool art displays, some of them dozens of feet high, lit up in the night sky. Or the weird custom vehicles, many shaped like creatures, that putter around the flat pan of the desert. But all the laser shows and dancing bored me.

Similarly, the early part on the beginnings of Burning Man was a bit rote. It basically sprung up as a performance piece by a group of San Francisco free spirit types, and before you knew it had become a major gathering of 50,000 people or more.

More interesting to me was the middle section that looks at the growing pains of the Fest. There is actually a staff of people who run things year-round, and a storage area in the desert that looks like the supply depot for an entire army battalion.

Most of the founders of Burning Man are now late-middle age or older, and have adapted their outlook as time has gone by. They worry openly about the event becoming too corporate, while at the same time fretting constantly about the safety and financial sustainability of the festival. We talk to one of the initial founders who walked out years ago when it started to become "a thing," saying he didn't want to be a cop or lawyer.

Larry Harvey, generally recognized as the main founder of Burning Man, is now something of a doddering figurehead. He sits and nods at meetings and mostly seems kept around to be introduced at fundraising events. (He passed away a couple of years ago.) Marian, who was brought in soon after the first festival, seems to harness the heart of what Burning Man is all about, but is still pragmatic and level-headed.

One of the big controversies heading into the 2012 fest is that for the first time they're having to limit tickets using a lottery system, shutting out many of the camp members needed to stage their piece. It's a reflection on the nature of mankind, that a hippie party in the desert became big enough that it needs rules and money and organization, with all the attending strife you'd expect.

We also meet some of the artists who spend months beforehand putting together huge exhibitions just for Burning Man. There's Katy, who favors huge hearts or nude dancers, and Otto, a hardcase ex-Marine who creates a replica of Wall Street every year just to watch it burn.

"It's a Disneyland where the participants create the rides," one longtime attendee says.

I definitely know I wouldn't want to go to Burning Man. (Too much sun, for one thing.) But this colorful documentary at least sheds some light on why those who do, do.

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