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From the same desert, toward the same dark sky, my tired eyes open on the silver star, forever; but the Three Wise Men never stir, the Kings of life, the heart, the soul, the mind. 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!
– Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell (1873)
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There are mythic claims about Barbara Rubin: that she introduced Warhol to the Velvet Underground (she did), that she introduced Dylan to Ginsberg (she didn’t), that she was beacon and keeper of the New York counterculture (maybe). Here are two cold facts: In 1963, Rubin left a mental hospital and came to work at the infant Film-Makers’ Cooperative; that same year, she released the 16mm Christmas On Earth, a sensory feast born of two projectors, a lot of sex, and whatever the viewer had playing on AM radio. One begins to understand the mythology built around what writer and Boo-Hooray owner Johan Kugelberg describes as Rubin’s “sub-sub-sub-underground” reputation when one realizes that the filmmaker was 17 in 1963 and her film was among the most radical ever made.
How does a teenaged girl in an era of social propriety conceive of and execute a visionary orgy film originally entitled Cocks and Cunts? In the first of three retrospectives celebrating Jonas Mekas’s 90th birthday and focusing on his under-acknowledged peers—Jack Smith and Piero Heliczer forthcoming—he and co-curator Kugelberg attempt to answer the question through ephemera and period artifacts, invoking the film’s impossibly hip time and place while leaving Rubin’s personal motivations enshrouded in Bohemian lore.
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When discussed, Christmas on Earth is often compared to Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, for better or worse. What remains is that, compared to Jack Smith’s campy outrageous on-screen orgy, Rubin came up with a radical, ritual-fueled depiction of sexuality, a pioneering work of expanded cinema. As noted in the Film-Makers’ Cooperative catalog, Christmas on Earth “has neither head nor tail”. Consisting of two reels which were supposed to overlap each other, the film required two projectors – one for the background reel and one, 1/3 smaller, for the front reel. Even if Rubin emphasizes the Duchampian aleatory procedure of screening in her writings, people can now enjoy a fixed digital form of Christmas on Earth. But does a fixed form do justice to Rubin’s performative intentions? 
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