The Birth of New Wisdom: Christmas on Earth, an Impossible Reconstruction

Art & Trash, episode 46
The Birth of New Wisdom: Christmas on Earth, an Impossible Reconstruction
Stephen Broomer, December 24, 2024

Barbara Rubin, at 18 years old, made Christmas on Earth as a challenge to the frigid, oppressive society in which she had come of age. A ward of Jonas Mekas and a major force in her own right in the New York underground, Rubin had direct experience confronting oppressors, defending a rebellious, transgressive strain of the New American Cinema typified by Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. Christmas on Earth, made in the midst of such confrontations, is Rubin’s response to Flaming Creatures, and an extension of its challenge. It is an act of expanded cinema, a projector performance, in which two half-hour reels, played simultaneously, invite us to witness painted bodies in a variety of couplings.

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer deals with Rubin’s film and its endurance, in terms of anachronism and the parallels between sexual experience and evanescent art-making.

SCRIPT:

Barbara Rubin, at 18 years old, made Christmas on Earth as a challenge to the frigid, oppressive society in which she had come of age. A ward of Jonas Mekas and a major force in her own right in the New York underground, Rubin had direct experience confronting oppressors, defending a rebellious, transgressive strain of the New American Cinema typified by Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. Smith’s film had provoked censors in New York, where it was made, and as far afield as Belgium, where Rubin, Mekas and P. Adams Sitney defiantly screened it against the wishes of the Knokke-Le-Zoute festival in 1963, in an emblematic confrontation with conservative hypocrisy, a confrontation with the festival’s jurors and those like them, who would meet frank sexuality with cowardice and puritanical censorship and accusations of obscenity. Christmas on Earth, made in the midst of such confrontations, is Rubin’s response to Flaming Creatures, and an extension of its challenge. It is an act of expanded cinema, a projector performance, in which two half-hour reels, played simultaneously, invite us to witness painted bodies in a variety of couplings.

Christmas on Earth is composed of two reels, packaged with instructions to the projectionist: “The film on the first projector fills the screen, while the image on the second projector is approximately one half smaller and fills the middle of the screen, superimposing on the first image.” The projectionist has the option to add colour by screening the film through colour filters, “moved or alternated by hand during the screening." The films are meant to start simultaneously, with one running a little shorter than the other. For a soundtrack, Rubin directs the projectionist to hook a radio up to a PA system, “with a nice cross-section of psychic tumult like an AM rock station, turned on and played loud.” The projectionist was to choose which of the two reels to project at half scale. The decision could be made by chance, with a significant impact on the perception of the film, as the contents of the reels themselves differ greatly, although all scenes are captured from the same event: one reel is preoccupied with close-up presentations of genitalia, often overlapping through superimpositions; the other reel emphasizes faces and the full bodies of its participants, posed alone and together.

Dancer Barbara Gladstone appears throughout, a blackface minstrel in full-body greasepaint, white strokes defining her face like the graphic forms found in African sculpture. From minstrel show to orgy, the figures are fragmented and the fragments reduced to details, curves, curling pubic hairs and creased skin. Gladstone’s counterpart is a male figure in white face-paint, formal clothes and top hat, a minstrel inverted in chalk. Like the film stock, the figures are simply black and white, but Gladstone’s gyrations and the contrast of her garish lips and the dazzling white of her eyes provoke the racist spectacle of minstrelsy. On one reel, gasping orifices are superimposed until they form a pulsating, abstract light; the spread lips of a vagina, a fist stroking a penis, and the swelling, probing tongue of Gladstone’s minstrel combine in shimmering, overlapping forms, the total sex organ, an amalgam of mouth, vagina, penis, anus. The film’s original title was Cocks and Cunts, as if to dare the vice squad to press charges; but that title is also a deceptively direct description of the film’s content. Christmas on Earth is a film of genital worship, casting phallus and orifice plainly on screen. For Rubin’s players, sex is kinetic and violent and joyous; and its joyousness is on display in the final scene, as the figures are united in a tableaux on both screens, waving to the camera. Jonas Mekas declared it a film of “terrible beauty,” the terror of the bare facts of being human, of the human form as a machine of bone and muscle. It is also a film that acknowledges the body as object, unelaborated by the beautifying lens of western art. It ends in that freedom, lovers and symbols waving, echoing, on one reel larger than life, on the other, homunculi. Barbara Rubin took the title from Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. That awaited Christmas on earth, for Rimbaud, is a new age of new feelings, of liberation from tyrants and demons, an end to superstition, where new wisdom brings new mysteries.

Christmas on Earth was conceived to be ‘of its time’, regardless of how regressive and quaintly repulsive blackface minstrelsy already was in 1963. The parameters Rubin set for the film have presented the keepers of her legacy with a challenge, and attempts to preserve it in the video era have been marked by academic patchwork. The AM radio tuning of 1963 cannot be duplicated, and even if it were, it would only date and in dating decay the events on screen. That radio tuning can instead be simulated, substituted, but with sound and image disconnected, the stage is set for anachronism. It is machined anachronism. Invaded by the psychic tumult and top 40 of 1966, 1978, 1991, 2025, the gulf between sound and vision deepens. Does this anachronism trap the image in 1963, or is the erotic force of the film renewed, each new alignment another trip to a bountiful, infinite well, all of these flexing muscles and organs wetted anew, re-oiled, by a change of sonic guard? By transferring the film to video, the predetermined, locked-in relation between the screens subverts Rubin’s intention, to have two beams of light rub up against each other; fixed in place, they become a single image, less an interpenetration than a newborn composition.

Not all experiences exist to be held onto; some fade away, for the shame of them, like the blackface minstrel show, or for that matter, vice squad raids on art galleries. Are such persecutions ever gone for good, dimly remembered only as a portrait of a time when man was wolf to man? Other experiences, from long nights spent in erotic splendour, to briefer acts of clarity, like the caress or the orgasm, simply fade away in the growing distance between remembered pleasure and the present moment. Christmas on Earth is a challenge to an ossifying, tyrannical system, and it makes this declaration of new wisdom, sung from the total sex organ: vitality is energy that we spend. Vitality once spent can be renewed, but it cannot be recovered.