Barbara Rubin Papers

Filmmaker and writer Barbara Rubin (1945-1980), born in Cambria Heights, Queens, NY, was 17 when, not long discharged from a Connecticut institution, she began working for Jonas Mekas at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque in New York in 1963. Using a 16mm camera lent to her by Mekas, she began filming Christmas On Earth in the Lower East Side apartment of Tony Conrad and John Cale at 56 Ludlow Street, where Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed later lived (and, first recorded "All Tomorrow's Parties"). Christmas On Earth is sexually explicit to a degree surprising for its time. The film - more technically a cinematic "performance" - typically screened as per her instructions on two projectors with a contemporary rock radio soundtrack. During the next few years she was an active participant in the New York underground art scene, where she introduced Allen Ginsberg to Bob Dylan, and Andy Warhol to the Velvet Underground, at whose Exploding Plastic Inevitable performances she both participated and projected her film. Rubin filmed the Velvets in an early performance in 1965; however, the footage is now lost. She drew up plans for sequels to her film but these were never filmed; one of her synopses (which she sent to Walt Disney), proposed a plot wherein French author Jean Genet (playing himself, but as a Bowery bum) is rescued from his situation by fairies. While there were a handful of additional screenings before the end of the 1960s, soon after joining a Hasidic sect, Rubin instructed Mekas to destroy her film. He didn't, and later she agreed that Christmas On Earth could again be shown, as it has been regularly since 1983. After giving up filmmaking she married and moved to France. She died in 1980, age 35, after giving birth to her sixth child.