Barbara Rubin

The 29-minute experimental film Christmas on Earth caused a sensation when it first screened in New York City in 1964. Its orgy scenes, double projections and overlapping images shattered artistic conventions and announced a powerful new voice in the city's underground film scene. All the more remarkable, that vision belonged to a teenager, 18-year-old Barbara Rubin. A Zelig of the '60s, she introduced Andy Warhol to the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan to Kabbalah and bewitched Allen Ginsberg. The same unbridled creativity that inspired her to make films when women simply didn't, saw her breach yet another male domain, Orthodox Judaism, before her mysterious death at 35. Lifelong friend Jonas Mekas saved all her letters, creating a rich archive that filmmaker Chuck Smith carefully sculpts into this fascinating portrait of a nearly forgotten artist. An avante-garde maverick, a rebel in a man's world, Barbara Rubin regains her rightful place in film history.

This is a mini-portrait of one of the legendary figures of the 60s who should be credited for the discovery of the Velvet Underground, for saving Bob Dylan's mind after the motorcycle crash, for her pioneering sound/image installations, for keeping the New York Sixties' art community together, for one of the key works of erotic cinema Christmas on Earth, and etc. and etc.

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.

This intimate portrait of Andy Warhol pulls together a unique library of material shot by New York film legend Jonas Mekas. Spanning from 1963 to 1990, the film features a cast of counterculture icons including Allen Ginsberg, George Maciunas, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono, as well as John and Caroline Kennedy, and Lee Radziwill (Jackie Kennedy Onassis's sister and Warhol muse)—to whom Mekas dedicates the film. The film features footage from the Velvet Underground's first public performance. A portrait of the remarkable life of arguable the twentieth century's most famous artist and leading iconographer.

Jonas Mekas adjusts to a life in exile in New York in his autobiographical film, shot between 1949 and 1963.

A short film from Jonas Mekas depicting an afternoon in New York of people joining in singing "Hare Hare"

Part of the Dirt Trilogy

The Velvet Underground's first public appearance, filmed in Super 8 at a Psychiatrist's Convention, at the Delmonico Hotel, New York, January 14, 1966. Andy Warhol was invited to speak at the annual banquet of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. He brought along the Velvets and other factory regulars.

The films were made between 1964 and 1966 at Warhol's Factory studio in New York City. Subjects were captured in stark relief by a strong key light, and filmed by Warhol with his stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent, black and white, 100-foot rolls of film at 24 frames per second. The resulting two-and-a-half-minute film reels were then screened in 'slow motion' at 16 frames per second.

A short film by underground filmmaker Barbara Rubin.

Two nuns take a bath, then meet a sailor on the Staten Island Ferry.

Where a nun and a nurse go to hell because of their sinful life in St. Vincent's Hospital.

A 16mm silent four minute reel from ca. 1964 by Barbara Rubin. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

For all intents and purposes, "Christmas on Earth" is a performance art film about genital worshipping. At 29 minutes, Barbara Rubin has created the ultimate study on the celebratory and erotic nature of free-love. The film is tinted in various colors, hence the title, and finds various individuals engaging in sexual activity. Men with women, men with men, women with women, and several orgies throughout.