Barbara Rubin | Christmas on Earth / 1963-1965

the one-shot miracle

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barbara Rubin (director) Christmas on Earth / 1963-1965 [the version I watched was made in 2019]

 

The first paragraph of Giulia Rho’s otherwise rather academic essay, “Anarchiving the New York Avant-Garde: The Phantom of Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth,” published in Frames Cinema Journal rather nicely summarizes the work I am about to discuss:

 

“Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (1963-1965) is one of the most transgressive and provocative films of the North American avant-garde. Just a seventeen-year-old* ‘woman with a movie camera,’ Rubin shot the film on a 16mm Bell and Howell borrowed from none other than Jonas Mekas, the “midwife,” in his own words, of the New York avant-garde. The 20-minute short film is considered ‘one of the most sexually explicit, beautifully hallucinatory films to come out of the 1960s’** as it powerfully conveys the inexhaustible romanticism, physical experimentation and cultural desires of the era. Filmed over just a few days, at a drug-fuelled party in John Cale and Tony Conrad’s New York City apartment, it features three men and one or possibly two women engaged in various acts of lovemaking.*** The film’s psychedelic editing was further complicated by Rubin’s instructions for its screening, which involved two layered reels, coloured gels of the projectionists’ preference, and also the projectionist’s choice of live rock radio ‘played loud,’ so that the audience’s experience was never twice the same.”

     Amy Taubin, a close friend of Rubin’s, describes other cinematic decisions: “The action is filmed in two diametrically opposed styles. In one, bodies are painted black, with breasts and genitals outlined in white fluorescent paint, so that the couplings seem ritualistic. In the other, the lighting is bright and direct, and whatever mystery or eroticism has been suggested is thereby removed.”

     Rubin herself describes the process of her editing of the film she had first titled “Cocks and Cunts,” changing it later to the Rimbaud inspired title of Christmas on Earth****

 

“So I spent 3 months chopping the hours of film up into a basket and then toss and toss, flip and toss and one by one Absently enchantedly Destined to splice it together and separate on to two different reels and then project one reel half the size inside the other reel full screen size.”

     Inspired by other underground filmmakers such as Jack Smith’s (Flaming Creatures), Mekas, P.Adams Sitney, Jerry Jofen, and Gregory Markopoulos, Rubin’s 29-minute work met with great praise (Jonas Mekas described the process of seeing it: "The first shock changes into silence then is transposed into amazement. We have seldom seen such down-to-body beauty, so real as only beauty (man) can be: terrible beauty that man, that woman is..."), criticism (fellow filmmaker Ken Jacobs described it as “dreck”), and police raids as they attempted to suppress the film’s showings. Several critics have argued that it was this film that aroused Andy Warhol’s interest in making films.

      Just as the accompanying music changed during every showing, so did Rubin continue to edit it, Taubin describing what eventually became a self-destructive project:

 

“Christmas on Earth is Rubin’s only completed film. She edited and re-edited it obsessively, refining the relationships between the reels so that they would maintain their balance of intentional and aleatory congress no matter the circumstances of their projection—forward, backward, superimposed or sequential, in or out of sync. Night after night, she examined that succession of images, the sign of the central region of her being—as an artist, a lover, a midwife, a gynecologist, but mostly, I think, as a displaced person. Eventually she went too far and, having taken a lot of speed, cut a print of the film into three frame pieces, tossed them around in a trash basket and tried to paste them together. Luckily, Mekas had kept either the original edit or another early version.”

   It is a print made from Mekas’ archive that we watch today, although Rho justifiably wonders whether the DVD released by Filmmakers Co-op, “which froze the film into a definitive form rather than leaving the images to interact differently depending on exhibition circumstances,” along with a set soundtrack of music by The Velvet Underground and other songs of the day actually can be said to represent the original work.

     Obviously, there is something to be said for that argument; yet a film seized by the police, was dropped from Amazon on-line screening because of complaints of pornography, and has seldom been shown since the 1960s, along with the $200 rental fee charged for personal viewing makes it difficult to argue for the purists. If I am sympathetic with Rho’s comment that “The digital of Christmas on Earth is now a runaway document rebelling from official histories of the New York avant-garde, which seem to neglect the importance of Rubin,” yet I was absolutely delighted to be able to find one digital version of Rubin’s film still available from a Russian “ok” network which at least presented me with a notion of what the original might have been.

     I also must admit that seeing this film in 2025 is a truly different experience than what it must have looked like in 1963 or ’64, the year I might have graduated from high school. After decades and decades of pornographic pummeling, in which as an active gay man I certainly participated as a viewer, Rubin’s work seems rather tame, bemusing at times, and even formalistic, despite its editorial and presentational demands for happenstance.

     As a commentator going by the moniker of “theironcupcake” argued on the Letterboxd site, perhaps Rubin’s work is best understood in the context of its release in the year in which it was produced: —“If you consider some of the films that were produced by the American mainstream at the time, those innocent rom-coms with Doris Day or Sandra Dee—the ‘will she or won’t she?’ attitude of Sunday in New York—Rubin’s work makes for an eye-opening comparison. But 1963, the year when Rubin began her project, was also the year that Jayne Mansfield starred in Promises! Promises!, breaking new ground for a Hollywood actress to go topless, and the same time that Ingmar Bergman pushed the boundaries of erotic content with both sex and masturbation in The Silence, so the film world was more ready than ever to explore this territory. It’s also impossible not to think of Barbara Hammer’s later Multiple Orgasm and Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy and Fuses as the parade of intimate acts, extreme close-ups and body paint.”

      Of course, I might question even the notion of “those innocent rom-coms of Doris Day or Sandra Dee,” but what ironcupcake also doesn’t indicate, and perhaps explains one of the reasons why Rubin’s work has been so long ignored, is that Christmas on Earth isn’t simply a feminist work, or even a lesbian testimony to the female body, but features a great deal of audacious male-on-male sexual action. Rubin’s work is the real orgy, one might argue, that Jack Smith’s film pretends to be.

     And the very fact that a then underage female who later married and became a Hasidic Jew and died shortly after giving birth to her sixth child in 1980 had imagined and created in 1963 such a truly liberating work was a bit unthinkable to even the queer (still male dominated) underground moviemakers and critics. Clearly, in their minds, it didn’t bring film history and theory along with it, even if that knowledge was something to be satirized or even sacrificed in making their own movies. In short, as a young, seemingly “undereducated” female—despite the oft quoted references of Mekas and Warhol—Rubin simply didn’t have the proper credentials to propel her into film history. Rubin was akin to a one-shot miracle.

           

*Other sources point out that Rubin was 18 the year this film was shot and first released.

 

** Ara Osterweil, “Absently Enchanted.”

 

***As Rho notes in a footnote, John Cale (b. 1942) is a musician, member of The Dream Syndicate in the early 1960s, then of The Theater of Eternal Music with Tony Conrad, and eventually of The Velvet Underground. Tony Conrad (1940 – 2016) was a musician and structuralist video artist member of The Theater of Eternal Music with John Cale.”

     Among the recognizable figures involved in the night of sex were poet and filmmaker Gerard Malanga, Debra Feiner Coddington, and possibly Naomi Levine. However, Malanga argues that he didn’t recall Levine being there, but did remember a dancer with the Martha Graham School of Dance, Barbara Gladstone (not the New York gallerist).

 

****From Rimbaud’s poem “Morning” from A Season in Hell: “When will we go, over mountains and shores, to hail the birth of new labor, new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition, – to be the first to adore! – Christmas on earth!” (translation by Paul Schmidt).

 

Los Angeles, August 16, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).