Barbara Rubin
Forgotten Female: Barbara Rubin
Barbara Rubin (1945–1980) was an American filmmaker and performance artist. She is best known for her landmark 1963 underground film, Christmas on Earth.
More than just a filmmaker, Rubin was known for her dynamic personality and her knack for artistic matchmaking. Her friend Rosebud described Barbara at age 17 as “Naiveté, bubbly charm, she could convince anyone of anything.” As a dynamic teenager, she introduced The Velvet Underground to Andy Warhol, the Kabbalah to Bob Dylan, and “bewitched” and persuaded Allen Ginsberg to buy the East Hill Farm as a haven for poets in 1967.
This is why being remembered is important. Who we are matters and being remembered for who we were serves as a guide for those who might need us in the future. How many girls might have embraced art and filmmaking if they had learned about the influence of Barbara Rubin as much as they had the product of Warhol, Dylan, and Ginsberg? She energized, influenced, and even discovered established artists; yet we know their names but not hers—and without her, the others might not ever have been as known. We each play a part in history and to be dismissive of our impact by not remembering, is to partially live a lie, to rewrite history and to deprive future generations of a potential guide or inspiration on their path.
Yes, all of life is impermanence and we’re not here to glorify ourselves as a memory, we can’t control how others remember us or who remembers us, but if we are not remembered, we erase part of the purpose we served. I can’t remember everything about my Papa but remembering that his playfulness was the best part of my childhood makes me a better parent. I can’t remember every detail of my aunt but remembering that she loved and supported me has shaped the way I love and support my nieces and nephews. Yes, being remembered matters. I hope this piece ignites an interest in discovering more influential women who have been forgotten.
“Barbara was the moving force and coordinator between us all," Lou Reed said in a 2012 interview. Ed Sanders, in his review of Gordon Ball's memoir, 66 Frames, called her "the legendary Barbara Rubin, who wandered the era pollinating across the film, poetry, folk-rock, and peacemaking scenes."
I discovered this forgotten artist through a dear friend and life coach, Amy Glin @AmyGlinCoaching, who had recently watched the documentary, Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground. She said I reminded her of Barbara. When I asked in what ways, she said, “The way she wasn’t scared to put herself out there creatively—and was fueled by it and kept going and changing according to what moved her and what she thought was important. And she was ahead of her time. Both a blessing and a curse, as you know!” Hearing these words made me feel seen. Discovering Barbara Rubin, made me feel connected to something bigger, the cosmic memory, the eternal moment of now. If all time does in fact exists simultaneously, then remembering the past is being present in the now.
At age 18, a passionate Barbara Rubin made “Christmas on Earth” a 1963 sexual art house film. Imagine the courage, gumption, and confidence it took to accomplish something so bold at such a young age.
“The title, “Christmas on Earth,” derives from Arthur Rimbaud's “Morning,” from the extended poem A Season in Hell:
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!
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.”
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 that he initiated an affair with Rubin after seeing it for the first time. Jonas 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 (man) can be: terrible beauty that man, that woman is...” Others have dismissed the film as amateurish, and filmmaker Ken Jacobs called it “dreck.”
After only a few screenings in the sixties, Rubin asked Mekas to destroy the film; instead, he shelved it. Years later, she had another change of heart and gave him permission to screen it. “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.”
At the edge of her success, she left it all, became a Hasidic Jew, moved to a religious community in the south of France, had five children, and then died from a postnatal infection at the age of 35.
As I was writing about her, I felt her spirit continually say, “Call me by my chosen name,” which I suppose is what can be found on her tombstone:
“M Bracha Basha
Besancon
Nee Rubin
-7 Tishri 5741-”
The Godfather of avant-garde cinema, Jonas Mekas, penned these words after hearing of Barbara Rubin’s passing:
“Goodbye Barbara.
I owe you a lot
And so do many other people
I cannot imagine the NY film underground scene of the early 60s without you.
You breathe in like a mysterious agent.
You urged us,
you scolded us,
you pushed us,
you kept us together.
You provoked us.
And your belief and faith in what we were doing
Was absolute.
Ahh Barbara, you left us like Rimbaud.
You disappeared in the sands of some spiritual Africa
Never to come back.
Someday, some explorer will bring us some shreds of information.
Now however, I’m staring at a white sheet of paper in front of me and I can’t fathom any of it.”
I was so moved by her story that I wanted to quickly assemble the facts to remember her by. Therefore, this piece was thrown together with a few original sentences, paragraphs, sentiments, and mostly bits and bobs from the Barbara Rubin Wiki page. If you’d like to know more, please check out this free documentary on youtube about this artist remembered, Barbara Rubin.
If you enjoyed this piece, please check out my article, Brave and Bold at Substack.
Sage Justice, author of “Sage Words FREEDOM Book One.” If you’d like to read more pieces like this, please check out the book on Amazon, monthly articles at SageJustice.Substack.com, videos on YouTube (Sage Words: Almost Everything You Need to Know), inspiration on IG @SageWords2027, website and the podcast: Sage Words (Apple & Spotify). A like and follow on the Sage Justice, author page, on facebook is greatly appreciated. Thank you.