Film Culture #80: The Legend of Barbara Rubin

Magazine Launch

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.

Talk with Christian Hiller, Anne König und Marc Siegel
Screening of Barbara Rubin's "Christmas on Earth", Radio DJ: Susanne Sachsse
Reading by Ale Bachlechner

Entrance free

Film Culture 80: The Legend of Barbara Rubin
Editor-in-chief: Jonas Mekas
Editors of this issue: Chuck Smith, Charity Coleman, Christian Hiller, Anne König, Sebastian Mekas, Sarai Meyron and Marc Siegel
Texts by Barbara Rubin, Jonas Mekas, Chuck Smith, Ara Osterweil, Christian Hiller and Marc Siegel
Published by Spector Books, Leipzig
Designed by Tania Prill & Franziska Bauer, pre-cover Fabian Bremer, Pascal Storz (Spector Bureau) ca. 200 pp., English, ca. 80 black-white and color images, thread-sewn softcover
ISBN 978-3-95905-202-3
28.00 EUR