Christmas on Earth

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Christmas on Earth
Directed by Barbara Rubin
Edited byBarbara Rubin
Distributed by The Film-Makers' Cooperative
Release date
  • 1963 (1963)
Running time
29 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageSilent

Christmas on Earth is a 1963 American experimental short film directed by Barbara Rubin.

Contents

Description

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. [1] [note 1]

Production

The 29-minute film was inspired by Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures , [2] over which Rubin clashed with censors alongside Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney. [3] [4] 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 [5] and Gregory Markopoulos. [1] 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. [6]

Rubin, only 18 when she began filming in 1963, [note 2] shot the film using a borrowed 16mm Bolex camera, in New York City, in the Ludlow Street apartment of John Cale and Tony Conrad. [7]

The title derives from Arthur Rimbaud's "Morning" from the extended poem A Season in Hell: [8]

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! [9]

The film has been described by critics as "among the most radical ever made"; [10] "far and away the most sexually explicit film produced by the pre-porn underground"; [2] and "an essential document of queer and feminist cinema." [7]

Release

Due to its explicit nature, the New York City police tried to suppress the film; [11] for a time during the mid-1960s Rubin habitually carried her one copy around with her for safekeeping. [7] Allen Ginsberg was so impressed by Christmas on Earth he initiated an affair with Rubin after seeing it for the first time. 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..." [5] Others have dismissed the film as amateurish, and filmmaker Ken Jacobs called it "dreck." [7]

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." [8]

Notes

  1. ↑ 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 named 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.
  2. ↑ 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.

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References

  1. 1 2 Osterweil, Ara; Blaetz, Robin (2007). "Absently Enchanted: The Apocryphal, Ecstatic Cinema of Barbara Rubin". Women's Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks. Duke University Press. pp. 127–151. ISBN   9780822340447.
  2. 1 2 Hoberman, J. "Barbara Rubin and 'Christmas on Earth'". The New York Review of Books.
  3. ↑ Ed Sanders (2011). Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side. Da Capo Press. p. 76. ISBN   978-0306818882.
  4. ↑ Siegel, Marc; Holmlund, Chris (1997). Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, and Gay Documentary . University of Minnesota Press. p.  91. ISBN   9781452901312. p. adams sitney barbara rubin.
  5. 1 2 Osterweil, Ara (2010). "Queer Coupling, or The Stain of the Bearded Woman" (PDF). araosterweil.com. Wayne State University Press. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 20, 2014. Retrieved September 18, 2014.
  6. ↑ Belasco, Daniel. 2005. "The Vanished Prodigy." Art in America, Vol 93, No 11: 61–65, Daniel (2005). "The Vanished Prodigy". Art in America. 93 (11): 63–4.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  7. 1 2 3 4 Belasco, Daniel (May 2007). "Barbara Rubin: The Vanished Prodigy". Art Signal: 44–49. Archived from the original on December 4, 2018. Retrieved February 21, 2015.
  8. 1 2 Kugelberg, Johan. "Christmas on Earth: Barbara Rubin". Boo-Hooray Gallery. Archived from the original on June 14, 2014.
  9. ↑ Rimbaud, Arthur. "A Season in Hell: Morning, trans. Paul Schmidt".
  10. ↑ Klarl, Joseph (February 5, 2013). "Barbara Rubin: Christmas on Earth". The Brooklyn Rail.
  11. ↑ Stevenson, Jack (1997). "From the Bedroom to the Bijou: A Secret History of American Gay Sex Cinema". Film Quarterly. 51 (1): 28. doi:10.2307/1213528. JSTOR   1213528.
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