Film Culture 80: The Legend of Barbara Rubin

Having entered the New York underground in the 1960s while still a teenager, filmmaker Barbara Rubin (1945-80) quickly became one of its key figures. Her pioneering 1963 double-projection film Christmas on Earth, featuring painted and masked performers engaging in a variety of gay and straight sexual acts, was both aesthetically innovative and sexually provocative. She worked regularly with Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol, introduced Bob Dylan to Allen Ginsberg, and connected Warhol with The Velvet Underground.During an intense period of activity and travel, Rubin wrote passionate letters about film and the underground to Mekas. With its focus on a key figure in the avant-garde film scene in New York City in the 1960s and its mix of letters, interviews, photographs, essays and a film script, Film Culture 80: The Legend of Barbara Rubin retains the subject matter and multi-faceted approach that characterized the magazine during the four decades of its initial period of publication. By zeroing in on a fascinating, young female artist in a scene dominated by men, a woman whose perspectives and experiences have yet to be documented thoroughly, this new issue of Film Culture exemplifies as well the goals of the Edit Film Culture! project.