Did Andrei Tarkovsky inadvertently start Burning Man festival?
People watch and consume media for all sorts of different reasons. For many people, the landscape of movies and film simply acts as light-hearted entertainment, or a distraction from everyday life. However, it should never be forgotten that film has the power to change the world in a multitude of different ways. Andrei Tarkovsky was always conscious of that power, and his groundbreaking filmography has impacted countless people over the years, including those who first started Burning Man.
Music festivals are, by no means, a new thing. Ever since the days of hippie counterculture, young people have found joy in spending a weekend wallowing in mud and rain while watching their favourite artists perform. Today, music festivals are a colossal industry spanning all over the world. For many, festivals have become inseparable from the capitalistic focus of the modern music industry, but events like Burning Man exist in direct opposition to those harsh realities.
Held annually in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, the festival features no scheduled performers or artists, with the attendees free to create their own art and expression while they are there. Built upon ideals of radical self-expression and a rejection of mainstream society, the event has occurred annually since 1990. Originally, during the 1980s, the event was tied to the summer solstice and revolved around an annual campfire. However, the festival as we know it today has its origins tied to Andrei Tarkovsky.
In 1979, the Soviet director unveiled Stalker, a stunning sci-fi flick which follows three characters as they embark upon a quest to reach the “Zone”, an area within a desert wasteland in which their greatest desires will be realised. Although Western audiences largely ignored the film upon its release, subsequent years saw the work rightly hailed as a masterpiece of cinema, and the themes explored in Tarkovsky’s work inspired many people to follow in its footsteps.
In the wake of Stalker, Carrie Galbraith of The Cacophony Society came up with the idea of ‘Zone Trips’. These trips often lasted multiple days, broadly aiming to allow attendees to experience familiar settings as if they were entirely new. On a deeper level, however, these Zone Trips aimed to create an experience completely separate from the mundanity and consumerism of everyday life in America at the time.
Explaining the appeal of such trips, Cacophony Society member Michael Mikel once told The Burning Man Journal, “This was a time when we were immersed in consumer culture bombarded by advertising. And there was this lack of real experiences for people. We had television, and it was blasting away at us all the time. And there weren’t a lot of real deep experiences that we could do.”
One of these trips was to Black Rock Desert in Nevada, the future location of Burning Man. “I drew this line on the ground, and I had everybody line up,” Mikel recalled. “And I said, ‘We’re going into a place apart, a place that’s different from the world you’re used to.’ I had everybody step across the line. And that kind of sets up a state of mind where you actually begin to look at things differently.”
At its core, Mikel’s declaration during this Zone Trip formed the basis and manifesto for the Burning Man festival. Two years after that fateful trip into the desert, Burning Man held its first annual event, aiming to recapture the spirit of freedom and self-expression contained beautifully in Tarkovsky’s 1979 film. The director, of course, never lived to see the development of the annual event, passing away in 1986.
