Christmas on Earth


Christmas on Earth is a 1963 American experimental short film directed by Barbara Rubin.

Description

Originally titled Cocks and Cunts, Christmas on Earth features several painted and masked performers engaging in a variety of gay and straight sexual acts. The film's two separate black-and-white reels are projected simultaneously, one inside the other, with color filters placed on the projector lens, and, originally, an ad hoc soundtrack of contemporary rock radio. Performers included, among others, the underground star Gerard Malanga.

Production

The 29-minute film was inspired by Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, over which Rubin clashed with censors alongside Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney. Rubin's use of superimposition, and her decision to slice the original footage into "dynamic fragments," may have been influenced by the films of Jerry Jofen and Gregory Markopoulos. Rubin described her editing process as follows:
Rubin, only 18 when she began filming in 1963, shot the film using a borrowed 16mm Bolex camera, in New York City, in the Ludlow Street apartment of John Cale and Tony Conrad.
The title derives from Arthur Rimbaud's "Morning" from the extended poem A Season in Hell:
The film has been described by critics as "among the most radical ever made"; "far and away the most sexually explicit film produced by the pre-porn underground"; and "an essential document of queer and feminist cinema."

Release

Due to its explicit nature, the New York City police tried to suppress the film; for a time during the mid-1960s Rubin habitually carried her one copy around with her for safekeeping. Allen Ginsberg was so impressed by Christmas on Earth he initiated an affair with Rubin after seeing it for the first time. Mekas praised it in Film Culture: "The first shock changes into silence then is transposed into amazement. We have seldom seen such down-to-body beauty, so real as only beauty can be: terrible beauty that man, that woman is..."
After only a few screenings in the sixties, Rubin asked Mekas to destroy Christmas on Earth; instead, he shelved it. Years later she had another change of heart. The film's next public screening came in 1983, at the Collective for Living Cinema. Critic J. Hoberman praised it, commenting that "To see Christmas on Earth is to watch history remade." Filmmaker Ken Jacobs dismissed the film as amateurish, calling it "so awful—such an abomination". "Since 1983, it has been screened regularly," wrote Johan Kugelberg, "and is slowly but steadily taking its place in the canon of 1960s underground films and cultural milestones that unraveled American censorship law and opened the field for artistic studies of sexual narratives."