Anarchiving the New York Avant-Garde: The Phantom of Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth

This featurette addresses the encounter with the illicit digitised images of Barbara Rubin’s psychedelic short film Christmas on Earth (1963-65). Following So Mayer’s interpretation of Derrida’s archive fever as the ache of a phantom limb (2020), I take the film as an urgent invitation to question history and open it up to the ghosts who haunt it, demanding rightful recognition. This practice of anarchiving, to use Brian Massumi’s term, the disjointed digital archive of counter-cinema aims at reactivating the power of Christmas on Earth and building a sensual, bodily relationship with it across time and space. The hope is to revisit the past and relodge forgotten memories in contemporary contexts, so they can be inherited as a political legacy.   
This article contains images that feature nudity and sexual activity.


Anarchiving the New York Avant-Garde: The Phantom of Barbara Rubin's Christmas on Earth
Giulia Rho Barbara Rubin's Christmas on Earth (1963Earth ( -1965 is one of the most transgressive and provocative films of the North American avant-garde. Just a seventeen-year-old "woman with a movie camera", Rubin shot the film on a 16mm Bell and Howell borrowed from none other than Jonas Mekas, the "midwife", in his own words, of the New York avant-garde. 1 The 20minute short film is considered "one of the most sexually explicit, beautifully hallucinatory films to come out of the 1960s" as it powerfully conveys the inexhaustible romanticism, physical experimentation and cultural desires of the era. 2 Filmed over just a few days, at a drug-fuelled party in John Cale and Tony Conrad's New York City apartment, it features three men and one or possibly two women engaged in various acts of lovemaking. 3 The film's psychedelic editing was further complicated by Rubin's instructions for its screening, which involved two layered reels, coloured gels of the projectionists' preference, and also the projectionist's choice of live rock radio "played loud", so that the audience's experience was never twice the same. 4 In this featurette, I employ the methodology of anarchiving as devised by Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, which considers the archive as "a repertory of traces [that are] carriers of potential. They are reactivatable, and their reactivation helps trigger a new event which continues the creative process from which they came, but in a new iteration." 5 Through it, I interrogate the significance of Rubin's contribution to the American avant-garde, anarchiving Christmas on Earth by examining its dissident potential. Because the anarchive refers to the innate unruliness of the archive in the digital age and its constant variation through encounters, I reflect on how the event of watching Christmas on Earth lets the film "loose to proliferate through networks, mutating as [it] goes, and triggering follow-on events." 6 Finally, reading Rubin's work as a process of becoming, I question the spectral status of her legacy. Figure 1: Christmas on Earth (Rubin, 1963-65 August 2020. In an interview, Smith explained that the film had received complaints for its "pornographic content", and Amazon had decided to make streaming unavailable. 10  Partly at fault for Christmas on Earth's invisibility is the refusal of a feminist label, although Rubin embodied the quest for liberation and self-determination of many young women her contemporaries, as Joyce Johnson recounts in her Beat Generation memoir Minor Characters. 12 "Barbara, like Maya Deren", remembers Taubin, "didn't have any way to articulate that they were feminists. It was inchoate, their sense of, 'oh, there's patriarchy and it makes us feel bad, or inferior.' I mean it was even more inchoate than that". 13  Allegories of Cinema. 16 A film as famed as it is invisiblealthough its fate might be about to change.
The original print of Christmas on Earth preserved at the Filmmakers Co-op in New York City was recently digitised and made available for rental, but the opportunity to stream it added up to about 200 USD -a prohibitive price for personal viewing. The decision was apparently not without controversy. Taubin criticized the arrangement of separate reels into one digital file, which froze the film into a definitive form rather than leaving the images to interact differently depending on exhibition circumstances. 17 The same argument was made for the choice to add  up, the audience is "moved towards a sense of love's limitlessness". 22 The two reels produce a "kinesthetic frisson" which gives way to an erotic dialectic. 23 The film's frame-within-a-frame format reimagines the possibilities for penetration, as noted by scholars Sally Banes and David James 24 . Osterweil furthers this argument by considering the frenzied camera movements and the thrusting motion that mimics the viewers' immersion in the on-screen sexual acts. 25   The subjective exchange that derives from watching Christmas on Earth simulates the sensation of being haunted, as the audience's emotional and physical boundaries are breeched, and they experience the moment in communion with another whom they have never met. The erotic quality of Christmas on Earth derives therefore not only from its obvious sexual content, but from its formal design too. The visual style requires the spectator to surrender control and to experience desire and pleasure along with the performers rather than for them as objects.
Individual distinctions are muddled by Rubin's superimpositions and swinging camera movements, so that while the characters remain unknowable, the spectators delight in the overwhelming sensorium of alterity. The film is doubly intimate: on one hand it offers an erotic textual experience, in which the penetrative reciprocity shatters the audience's sense of self and allows for the emergence of a "ghost", here meaning the unfulfilled possibility of Rubin's legacy and her intention to dispel sexual taboos. On the other, engaging with the film in its online form is a flirtation, a romance with the "spectral messianicity" of the digital archive which directs desire towards actualising forgotten histories and participating in a connection that will liberate images from silence and place them in a constellation with the viewers' preexisting knowledge. 26 Such duplicity confirms Christmas on Earth's status as an anarchive, because the film is a "feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation". 19 The digital version furthers the process of improvisation that Rubin intended for her screenings, making itself available to infinite audiences and in a myriad of locations.
Watching the film in this format, albeit deviating from the original projection instructions, becomes a "militantly melancholic practice that struggles against amnesiac history", a productive nostalgia that ignites a renewed curiosity for Rubin's intents. 27 Rubin constructed the "fantastical, Orientalist sexual space" in which the action takes place as a 1960s wonderland in which dichotomies cease to exist and gender roles collapse. 28  desire of being spread and occupied, of being made multiple and more than oneself. It is also important to note that throughout the film sexuality is never associated with violence or discomfort. Rather, the "polymorphous pleasures of eccentric embodiment" are enjoyed consensually and enthusiastically. 29 The uninhibited expression of sexual desire at play in Christmas on Earth attempts to shed the constraints of erotic taboos, imagining a "sexual utopia, unpolluted by the political economy of the present". 30 In its treatment of multifaced interactions and blurred identities, the film asserts the triumph of plurality and alterity over the phallomorphism of both mainstream cinema and the underground scene of New York in the 1960s. It critiques and furthers the formal experiments of the American avant-garde, contributing a young woman's perspective, and challenges the viewer to welcome the repressed. It is no surprise then that "the silence surrounding Christmas on Earth is at once appropriate and appalling, for the film more than delivers on the promise… of its wonderful title". 31 The teenage babushka "angel of Love", Barbara Rubin was committed to eradicating the same censorship that has obscured the significance of her contribution to the New York art scene. 32 Nevertheless, she pervades scholarship and pop culture alike in absentia, so that forgetting her only leaves traces of her presence. Her image haunts the memory of the men she supported, infecting all those around her with a feverish sensation that there is somebody to be remembered, a symptom of Derrida's mal d'archive, translated by So Mayer as "the phantom ache of the lost limb, the history that can be accessed only through its absence". 33 Barbara Rubin, like a true "wretched of the screen", disrupts the persistence of vision so that we witness at once the existence of alternative histories and their erasure. 34 The fragments that make up Rubin's legacy constitute a repertoire of traces which survives as an anarchive, a surplus-value testimony of the official histories of the New York underground.
Albeit existing in the interstice of memory, Rubin and her art are not inert, but rather are reactivatable. They "serve as a springboard" because they are "compositional forces seeking a new taking-form; lures for further process". 35  Perhaps Christmas on Earth has been an anarchive from its inception, because "anything that structures the potential for feelingand thus action, remembering, thinkingcould be thought of as an anarchive" and the film is about possible actions and visions for the future, a time to come not-yet-here as its title suggests. 37 Today, Christmas on Earth conjures an alternative history within easily accessible archival film collections, and to view it is a "process of deviation from the ordered, of the seeking for the new within or around the old". 38 The inevitable melancholia derived from watching a lowresolution copy of Christmas on Earth available illegally online is a perpetual mourning for a loss of visual plenitude and for the contingencies of live screenings, but also a call to action that reaches out across time. Witnessing the disappearance of images with which we identify our most vulnerable identities gives us a sense of our own possible erasure because, in the words of Laura U. Marks: "cinema disappears as we watch, and indeed as we do not watch". 39 This leads one to wonder whether it is not the film's inconsequentiality that has led to its silencing, but rather the dangerous energy it contains. The persistent ache that occupies the empty space of the lost object can give us a clue: attending to the phantom of Barbara Rubin, there is a feeling of possibility that something is still virtual and waiting to be actualised. The experience of watching Christmas on Earth and losing oneself to its psychedelic pleasures is a beginning, an early unmasking of the hegemonic notions of identity and the stereotypes it maintains. While many have dismissed Rubin's apocryphal career for her young age and the unique performance of her vision of art as community, it would be a mistake not to allow her to queer our understanding of the New York avant-garde. Engaging with her legacy and liberating Christmas on Earth from the interstice of forgetting is to give in to the same ardent yearning the film awakes in us and to release the force of Rubin's imaginary by putting it in contact with viewer's own dissident potential.