Trailer + Intro: Barbara Rubin & the Exploding NY Underground

“I cannot imagine the New York 1960s film and poetry scene without Barbara Rubin.”—Jonas Mekas 

“Barbara Rubin was the glue that held all of us together.”—Lou Reed

If you’ve never heard of Barbara Rubin, as is very likely, then the documentary Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground will come as a revelation and expand your sense of the 1960s underground art, music, writing, and film community. Her indefatigable energy, desire, and integrity placed her in the center of the New York art scene in a moment of remarkable adventurousness and innovation. She’s the person who introduced Andy Warhol to the Velvet Underground and, reportedly, Bob Dylan to Alan Ginsberg. She appears on the back cover of Dylan’s album Bringing It All Back Home. Through similarly behind-the-scenes activities, her life force changed the direction of the cultural landscape of New York at the time. Her life is a fascinating and ultimately unknowable mystery—from a Connecticut sanitarium to the New York underground to an ultra-orthodox Hasidic sect, where she died giving birth to her fifth child. But her legacy remains her unclassifiable landmark 1963 film Christmas on Earth. 

The working title for Rubin’s film, Cocks and Cunts, probably sets up a viewer’s expectations more accurately than Christmas on Earth, a title taken from Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell.” It’s still astonishing to realize that Rubin was only 17 when she made one of most visionary, radical, and erotically free films you’ll ever see. A non-stop orgy of bodies and sexualities (across all spectrums), Christmas on Earth is a rebuke to censorship and convention in all forms. Originally made to be projected via two 16mm projectors (superimposed over top of each other at different sizes) with a live radio soundtrack set to, per Rubin’s instructions, “a rock station turned on and played loud,” no two screenings of Christmas on Earth were ever the same. 

Our screening of Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground will introduce you to this remarkable woman but after the film, we’ll be treating audiences to a screening of a new digital version of Christmas on Earth, with a special soundtrack created by experimental filmmaker Bradley Eros full of 1960s garage rock nuggets and radio spots. It should be an evening of exploration and searches for transcendental utopias.