Barbara Rubin

Barbara Rubin (1945 - 80) was an American filmmaker and performance artist who spent most of her life in New York City before relocating to France in 1973. In the early 1960s Rubin began working for Jonas Mekas as part of the Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York City through which she met a variety of filmmakers and artists engaged in experimental film production and distribution. Rubin gained significant attention for her 1963 film “Christmas on Earth,” a landmark underground film depicting a variety of costumed performers engaged in homo- and heterosexual sexual acts that is considered a key work in the history of queer and feminist cinema. The films avant-garde status arose not only from the film's sexually explicit content but also from Rubin's radical cutting and splicing of the original footage and the superimposition of two simultaneous projections when shown. Rubin went on to collaborate with a variety of artists and filmmakers including Andy Warhol - who cites her as one of the primary influences on the growth of multimedia art in New York, Ron Rice and Piero Heliczer. Christmas on Earth was screened at The Kitchen in 1983 alongside the French writer and activist Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour (1950) as part of a double bill focusing on sexual and formal transgressions in avant-garde film.