(The brewery is open from 4pm. Film starts at 8.30) 

A SAFE PLACE    1971 Directed by Henry Jaglom 94 minutes In English

Here is another one of those flicks that was only allowed to be made in the 70s, when things weren't so controlled and expression was given free reign. It's directed by the off-beat Henry Jaglom (a few years ago I screened his brilliant film Tracks with Dennis Hooper). This was Jaglom's first film and he brings in loads of fresh ideas that shatter all our expectations of what cinema is. Jaglom brings cinema back to life, instead of following stereotypes... one feels he is trying to reconfigure cinema according to our real experience as human beings.

This is a free-floating movie about a young woman (Tuesday Weld) who is looking for her place in the world. It is as simple and open as that, and it's set in NYC. She is stuck in a relationship that is only a fraction of what she needs. The film is partly about the refusal to give into a dead-end reality that is being offered us by the media. In a way, it is also about magic, and to kick that aspect in, two actors mysteriously appear - Jack Nicholson, and Orson Welles as a magician she meets in a park.

Jaglom said his aim was to make a movie about the unrepressed lives of real women. He looked at American movies and felt the way women were being represented had nothing to do with the women he knew. His partner at the time was actress Karen Black, and he used her emotions, observations and dreams to create this dreamy flick. Instead of just repeating the kind of movie other men had made before... movies coming from a hardcore male perspective, Jaglom opens up the structure. It is more emotional (not dramatic) and intuitive than most movies, making it more free and experimental than, closer to let's say, a Lynch film.

When the French writer Anaïs Nin saw this film, she called it a masterpiece and wrote a review of it called 'In Favor of the Sensitive Man.' She said "all the subtle dreams and fantasies which color our experience are captured on film for the first time." Perhaps a fitting film for Butcher's Tears' present incarnation - a movie about keeping ones dreams alive in a dangerous world of capitalist realism.... after all, how is anyone except the greedy going to find a "safe place" in a dreamless world of competition and total business?

This will be a high-definition screening.