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).
