ASTROCARNIVAL

As a member of the BBS, Pinter directed two shorts before fleeing to the Americas. Astrocarnival was part 1 of the Nomad Newsreels, a Super 8 “letter home” from the runaway Pinter, covering a dance parade in San Francisco, with a prominent soundtrack finely tuned to his stop-action filming. As the rhythmical extravaganza is occasionally juxtaposed with TV images of rockets, space travel and the news, one notices how the tribal music is lively yet alarming and the atavistic dances suggest a “rain-dance exorcism”of the cold war era. Even if it is not a BBS film, it is an underrated and rare experimental film that projects many the Studio’s signature principles onto an American backdrop. Pinter eventually returned to Budapest.