Barbara Rubin (1945–1980) was an American filmmaker and performance artist. She is best known for her landmark 1963
underground film ''Christmas on Earth''.
Life and career
Barbara Rubin grew up in the
Cambria Heights neighborhood of Queens, New York City. In the spring of 1963, she was hired by
Jonas Mekas to work for
the Film-Makers' Cooperative, a non-profit organization co-founded by several artists to distribute avant-garde films.
The cooperative was frequented by many notable artists, including
Robert Frank
Robert Frank (November 9, 1924 – September 9, 2019) was a Swiss photographer and documentary filmmaker, who became an American binational. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled ''The Americans'', earned Frank comparisons to a modern-da ...
,
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...
,
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí of Púbol (; ; ; 11 May 190423 January 1989) was a Spanish Surrealism, surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarr ...
,
Ron Rice,
Jerry Jofen,
Jack Smith,
and
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationsh ...
.
Rubin soon became indispensable to Mekas, organizing local and international events. "Her contributions are so many and different," Mekas said in 2003. "....Her life story still has to be written because she was very, I think, important."
''Christmas on Earth''
Originally titled ''Cocks and Cunts'', ''Christmas on Earth'' features several painted and masked performers engaging in a variety of gay and straight sexual acts. The film's two separate black-and-white reels are projected simultaneously, one inside the other, with color filters placed on the projector lens, and, originally, an ad hoc soundtrack of contemporary rock radio. Performers included, among others, the underground star
Gerard Malanga
Gerard Joseph Malanga (born March 20, 1943) is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, actor, curator and archivist.
Early life
Malanga was born in the Bronx in 1943, the only child of Italian immigrant parents. In 1959, at the beginning of h ...
.
[According to Ara Osterweil, Naomi Levine was one of the performers, but Gerard Malanga wrote (in an email dated September 19, 2014) that he didn't remember Levine being there, but rather "a girl name]
Barbara Gladstone
(not to be confused with the gallerist) who was studying modern dance with the Martha Graham School of Dance." She later moved to London and made a film with another expatriate New Yorker, Stephen Dwoskin
Stephen Dwoskin (15 January 1939 – 28 June 2012) was a major avant-garde filmmaker whose work was closely connected to the ' gaze theory' associated with Laura Mulvey; a significant disabled filmmaker – though he rejected being framed as suc ...
. The 29-minute film was inspired by Jack Smith's ''
Flaming Creatures'',
over which Rubin clashed with censors alongside Mekas and
P. Adams Sitney
P. Adams Sitney (born August 9, 1944 in New Haven, Connecticut), is a historian of American avant-garde cinema. He is known as the author of ''Visionary Film'', one of the first books on the history of experimental film in the United States.
Life ...
.
Rubin's use of
superimposition, and her decision to slice the original footage into "dynamic fragments," may have been influenced by the films of
Jerry Jofen and
Gregory Markopoulos
Gregory J. Markopoulos (March 12, 1928 – November 12, 1992) was an American experimental filmmaker.
Biography
Born in Toledo, Ohio in 1928 to Greek immigrant parents, Markopoulos began making 8 mm films at an early age. He attended USC Film Sc ...
.
Rubin described her editing process as follows:
: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.
Rubin, only 18 when she began filming in 1963,
[Most sources say Rubin was 17 or 18 when she made the film; she turned 18 in 1963, the year the film is commonly believed to have been made, and her birth date is unknown. Rubin's friend, Rosebud Feliu Pettet, wrote (in an email dated September 21, 2014) that some of the filming for ''Christmas on Earth'' was done in 1964, and the final version may not have been completed until early 1965.] shot the film using a borrowed 16mm
Bolex camera, in New York City, in the Ludlow Street apartment of
John Cale
John Davies Cale (born 9 March 1942) is a Welsh musician, composer, singer, songwriter and record producer who was a founding member of the American rock band the Velvet Underground. Over his six-decade career, Cale has worked in various styl ...
and
Tony Conrad
Anthony Schmalz Conrad (March 7, 1940 – April 9, 2016) was an American video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician, composer, sound artist, teacher, and writer. Active in a variety of media since the early 1960s, he was a pioneer of both d ...
.
The title derives from
Arthur Rimbaud's "Morning" from the extended poem ''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!
The film has been described by critics as "among the most radical ever made";
"far and away the most sexually explicit film produced by the pre-porn underground";
and "an essential document of queer and feminist cinema."
Due to its explicit nature, the New York City police tried to suppress the film;
for a time during the mid-1960s Rubin habitually carried her one copy around with her for safekeeping.
Allen Ginsberg was so impressed by ''Christmas on Earth'' he initiated an affair with Rubin after seeing it for the first time. Jonas Mekas praised it in ''
Film Culture'': "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..."
Others have dismissed the film as amateurish, and filmmaker
Ken Jacobs
Ken Jacobs (born May 25, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American experimental filmmaker. His style often involves the use of found footage which he edits and manipulates. He has also directed films using his own footage.
Ken Jacobs directed ...
called it "dreck."
After only a few screenings in the sixties, Rubin asked Mekas to destroy the film; instead, he shelved it. Years later she had another change of heart and gave him permission to screen it. "Since 1983, it has been screened regularly," wrote Johan Kugelberg, "and is slowly but steadily taking its place in the canon of 1960s underground films and cultural milestones that unraveled American censorship law and opened the field for artistic studies of sexual narratives."
Collaboration with Andy Warhol
Rubin, according to Andy Warhol, "was one of the first people to get multimedia interest going around New York."
Although young, she had been working with Mekas for some time when she met Warhol, and brought ideas and experience to their collaboration. Christopher Mele wrote, "Experimental filmmakers Barbara Rubin and Andy Warhol utilized technologies such as multiple screens, slides, and projectors, and integrated other media, such as sculpture, music, and lighting to create a total experience that varied each night."
In 1965 Rubin was the subject of one of Warhol's ''
Screen Tests
The ''Screen Tests'' are a series of short, silent, black-and-white film portraits by Andy Warhol, made between 1964 and 1966, generally showing their subjects from the neck up against plain backdrops. The ''Screen Tests'', of which 472 survive ...
'' (filmed by Gerard Malanga).
That same year she appeared in
Piero Heliczer
Piero Heliczer (June 20, 1937 – July 22, 1993) was an Italian-American poet, publisher, actor and filmmaker associated with the New American Cinema.
Life and career
Heliczer was born in Rome to a German mother and a Polish father. His film car ...
's underground film, ''Dirt'', with Warhol,
Edie Sedgwick, and others.
She also appeared in Heliczer's ''Venus in Furs'', along with
the Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground was an American rock band formed in New York City in 1964. The original line-up consisted of singer/guitarist Lou Reed, multi-instrumentalist John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison, and drummer Angus MacLise. MacLise w ...
, and was included in a CBS news segment about the film titled "The Making of an Underground Film."
More famously, it was Rubin who first introduced the Velvet Underground to Warhol, through Malanga, in December 1965.
[According to Gerard Malanga, the Bockris book's account of the introduction gets a few details wrong in regard to who was present in the Café Bizarre on which night. Also, according to Rosebud Pettet, Rubin made the introduction at Pettet's urging. All the sources seem to agree on one thing, however: It was Barbara Rubin who arranged the introduction.]
A few weeks later, Rubin took part in a headline-making Warhol performance at a psychiatrists' convention:
:On January 13, 1966, Warhol was invited to be the evening's entertainment at the NY Society for Clinical Psychiatry's forty-third annual dinner, held at Delmonico's Hotel. Bursting into the room with a camera, as the Velvet Underground acoustically tortured the guests and Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick performed the "whip dance" in the background, Rubin taunted the attending psychiatrists. Casting blinding lights in their faces, Rubin hurled derogatory questions at the esteemed members of the medical profession, including: "What does her vagina feel like? Is his penis big enough? Do you eat her out?" As the horrified guests began to leave, Rubin continued her interrogation: "Why are you getting embarrassed? You're a psychiatrist; you're not supposed to get embarrassed." The following day the NY Times reported on the event; their chosen headline, "Shock treatment for psychiatrists," reveals the extent to which Rubin's guerrilla tactics had inverted the sanctioned relationship between patient and doctor, expert and amateur.
::—Ara Osterweil
Later that year Rubin, dressed as a nun,
projected ''Christmas on Earth'' onto the performing Velvet Underground as part of Andy Warhol Up-Tight and the
Exploding Plastic Inevitable
The ''Exploding Plastic Inevitable'', sometimes simply called ''Plastic Inevitable'' or ''EPI'', was a series of multimedia events organized by Andy Warhol in 1966 and 1967, featuring musical performances by The Velvet Underground & Nico, screenin ...
multimedia performances,
accompanying the EPI on the road.
Other work
More than just a filmmaker, Rubin was known for her dynamic personality and her knack for artistic matchmaking. It was Rubin who organized the
International Poetry Incarnation
The International Poetry Incarnation was an event at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 11 June 1965.
Background
In May 1965, Allen Ginsberg arrived at Better Books, an independent bookstore in London's Charing Cross Road, and offered to read an ...
at the Albert Hall in London in 1965
and in 1967 persuaded Allen Ginsberg to buy the East Hill Farm as a haven for poets.
She helped nurse her friend
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan (legally Robert Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter. Often regarded as one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture during a career sp ...
back to health after his motorcycle accident in 1966,
and appears on the back cover of his album ''
Bringing It All Back Home''.
She organized a two-week multimedia festival, "Caterpillar Changes," at the Filmmakers Cinematheque in 1967, in which films by
Harry Smith,
Shirley Clarke,
Storm de Hirsch
Storm de Hirsch (1912–2000) was an American poet and filmmaker. She was a key figure in the New York avant-garde film scene of the 1960s, and one of the founding members of the Film-Makers' Cooperative. Although often overlooked by historians ...
and others were projected onto torn sheets
and through hanging streamers.
"Barbara was the moving force and coordinator between us all,"
Lou Reed
Lewis Allan Reed (March 2, 1942October 27, 2013) was an American musician, songwriter, and poet. He was the guitarist, singer, and principal songwriter for the rock band the Velvet Underground and had a solo career that spanned five decades. ...
said in a 2012 interview.
[According to the Boo-Hooray gallery (in an email dated September 8, 2014), "That quote was delivered directly to Johan Kugelberg by Lou Reed over the telephone. Our publication is its first appearance in print."] Ed Sanders
Edward Sanders (born August 17, 1939) is an American poet, singer, activist, author, publisher and longtime member of the rock band the Fugs. He has been called a bridge between the Beat and hippie generations. Sanders is considered to have bee ...
, in his review of Gordon Ball's memoir, ''66 Frames'', called her "the legendary Barbara Rubin, who wandered the era pollinating across the film, poetry, folk-rock, and peacemaking scenes."
Final years
By the early 1970s, Rubin was twice married. The first marriage, to Mordechai Levy, was an arranged one and ended in divorce. The second was to Isaac Besancon, a French painter and follower of the mystical teachings of
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. Rubin and Besancon first lived in
Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Crown Heights is a neighborhood in the central portion of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Crown Heights is bounded by Washington Avenue to the west, Atlantic Avenue to the north, Ralph Avenue to the east, and Empire Boulevard/East New Yo ...
, in a small community of newly-observant artists that included filmmaker and collagist
Jerry Jofen and his wife, Ellen Gordon. Rubin later moved with her husband to a religious community in the
South of France
Southern France, also known as the South of France or colloquially in French as , is a defined geographical area consisting of the regions of France that border the Atlantic Ocean south of the Marais Poitevin,Louis Papy, ''Le midi atlantique'', A ...
in 1973. She died of a
postnatal infection in France in 1980 after giving birth to her fifth child. She was 35.
Filmography
Directed:
*''Christmas on Earth'' (1963)
*''Emunah'' (1972)
Appears in:
*''
Chumlum
''Chumlum'' is a 1963 American experimental short film directed by Ron Rice.
Description
''Chumlum'' is largely non-narrative, with no dialogue or clear succession of events. It begins with the exterior of a building before moving to a loft insid ...
'' (Ron Rice, 1963)
*''Dirt'' (Piero Heliczer, 1965)
*''Venus in Furs'' (Piero Heliczer, 1965)
*''Screen Test'' (Andy Warhol, 1965)
*''
Walden
''Walden'' (; first published in 1854 as ''Walden; or, Life in the Woods'') is a book by American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau. The text is a reflection upon the author's simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part ...
'' (Jonas Mekas, 1969)
*''Birth of a Nation'' (Jonas Mekas, 1997)
*''To Barbara Rubin with Love'' (Jonas Mekas, 2007)
*''Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol 1963-1990 (Jonas Mekas, 1982)
''Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground'', a biographical documentary about Rubin directed by
Chuck Smith, was released in 2018.
Notes
References
External links
*
Clip from ''Christmas on Earth''Poster for "Caterpillar Changes" festival''To Barbara Rubin With Love'' a video by Jonas Mekas
"Christmas on Earth: Barbara Rubin", an exhibit curated by Johan Kugelberg and Jonas Mekas, December 18 – January 15, 2013"Queer Coupling, or The Stain of the Bearded Woman" by Ara Osterweil"Absently Enchanted: The Apocryphal, Ecstatic Cinema of Barbara Rubin" by Ara Osterweil"Embodying the Spectator – Barbara Rubin's 'Christmas on Earth' and the Pornographic Avant-Garde" by Charles Tuck a write-up and review of the film "Barbara Rubin & the Exploding NY Underground" by Chuck Smith
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rubin, Barbara
1945 births
1980 deaths
American experimental filmmakers
Infectious disease deaths in France
People from Cambria Heights, Queens
Performance art in New York City
Date of birth missing
Date of death missing