Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground gives an influential artist her due

REVIEW by Drew Rowsome

28 Jul 2019

Filmmaker Barbara Rubin was an anomaly, hugely influential, but now mostly forgotten. Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground aims to rectify that historical and cultural oversight. Three anecdotes, presented in a matter of fact manner but accompanied by astounding footage, illustrate just how central Rubin was to the artistic world of the '60s which was, the fulcrum of culture as we know it now.

Rubin introduces Bob Dylan to Andy Warhol. Warhol gives Dylan one of the famous Elvis paintings but it won't fit in Dylan's car. So Rubin and Dylan strap it to the top of the car and drive off. The footage is hilarious.

Rubin organized the 1965 International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in London, England. Eight thousand people attended and watch rapt as Allen Ginsberg, who had a complicated relationship with Rubin, mesmerized. The footage is mesmerizing.

Rubin introduced The Velvet Underground to Andy Warhol and was instrumental in, and part of, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable which changed the course of popular music and performance. The footage of a young and beautiful Lou Reed is heartbreaking, and Warhol being interviewed by a "channel 10" newscaster is high hilarious camp comedy.

Rubin was a child of the '50s whose parents, according to the aunt and cousin interviewed, were too lenient. So Rubin was institutionalized as a teenager where she discovered drugs of all kinds through amphetamines that were prescribed to help her lose weight. By 17 she had moved to New York where she became indispensable to Jonas Mekas who ran the Filmmakers' Co-operative, dedicated to the creation and distribution of avant-garde and experimental films. 

Rubin is best known for her film Christmas on Earth, a title taken from a Rimbaud poem to replace her original title Cocks and Cunts. Made in 1963 when Rubin was 18, the film was too explicit for the swinging sixties. It is probably too explicit for our current porn-saturated age. One of the film's stars recounts how Rubin kept trying to get the camera further and further up her vagina.

However Christmas on Earth was/is not porn despite all the nudity and sex both straight and gay. Designed as two reels of film to be projected one atop the other and with coloured gels placed over the projectors at random intervals, Christmas on Earth quickly becomes abstract. The viewer becomes absorbed in the beauty of the shapes and colours and the human body is demystified and glorified at the same time. Inspired by Jack Smith's notorious Flaming Creatures, Christmas on Earth pushes the envelope beyond what anyone else dared.

After the success, in notoriety if not financial terms, Rubin wrote a sequel to Christmas on Earth and pitched it to Walt Disney, who she idolized. The film was to star Salvador Dali, members of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, Federico Fellini, Jean Genet, Marlon Brando and many other famous names, all of whom were friends of hers. Disney passed and the rest of Rubin's story is downhill, a mixture of drugs and possible mental illness, until she becomes fascinated with Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah. She winds up married to an orthodox Hasidic Jew and dies giving birth to her fifth child.

Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground makes a solid case for Rubin as a feminist hero, an artist who never got her chance or the acclaim she deserved because of her gender, but skims over a far more fascinating examination of '60s sexual exploration. Her ambiguous relationship with Ginsberg, they founded a commune based on the dictates of poetry that also housed a resident medicine woman (her interview begs to become an entire film), broke up when she wanted to bear his children. And over Ginsberg's long term, and central, relationship with Peter Orlovsky.

Reed and Warhol were also sexually fluid, and Christmas on Earth casually depicts considerable man on man sex, again very unusual for the '60s. Rubin herself performed enthusiastically in a lesbian portion of Warhol's film Kiss. There is an inner life that Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground touches upon but never unlocks. One is left with the tragic story of a very talented fag hag who then surrenders to a completely constricting lifestyle and gender role.

Fortunately we are left with the results of Rubin's work and networking. Without her, art, culture and film, would be radically different. Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground is the haunting story of how one person, now largely forgotten, helped push the world's mores and art forward. And the visuals are not to be missed by anyone who has sampled art, culture or film.