Barbara Rubin

Barbara Rubin (1945–1980) was an American experimental filmmaker and performance artist. She is best known for her landmark 1963 underground film Christmas on Earth. She frequently collaborated with other well-known artists in the underground movement. Rubin's filmography is often described as "radical" and "controversial". She was one of the first recognized female filmmakers of this movement. She is frequently cited as being the individual who introduced Andy Warhol to the American rock band The Velvet Underground.

Life and career Barbara Rubin grew up in the Cambria Heights neighborhood of Queens, New York City. At an early age she developed "weight problems" and began self medicating with diet pills, which resulted in her parents sending Rubin to a mental hospital, from which she was released in the spring of 1963. Shortly thereafter, she was hired by Jonas Mekas to work for the Film-Makers' Cooperative, a non-profit organization co-founded by several artists to distribute avant-garde films. The cooperative was frequented by many notable artists, including Robert Frank, Allen Ginsberg, Salvador Dalí, Ron Rice, Jerry Jofen, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol. Rubin soon became indispensable to Mekas, organizing local and international events. "Her contributions are so many and different," Mekas said in 2003. "....Her life story still has to be written because she was very, I think, important." In her teenage years, she became a notable figure in the underground film scene. Because of this, she did not film the event at all. The short film was inspired by Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, over which Rubin clashed with censors alongside Mekas and P. Adams Sitney. Rubin's use of superimposition, and her decision to slice the original footage into "dynamic fragments," may have been influenced by the films of Jerry Jofen shot the film using a borrowed 16mm Bolex camera, in New York City, in the Ludlow Street apartment of John Cale and Tony Conrad. "far and away the most sexually explicit film produced by the pre-porn underground"; for a time during the mid-1960s Rubin habitually carried her one copy around with her for safekeeping. Others have dismissed the film as amateurish, and filmmaker Ken Jacobs called it "dreck." Although young, she had been working with Mekas for some time when she met Warhol, and brought ideas and experience to their collaboration. Christopher Mele wrote, "Experimental filmmakers Barbara Rubin and Andy Warhol utilized technologies such as multiple screens, slides, and projectors, and integrated other media, such as sculpture, music, and lighting to create a total experience that varied each night."

In 1965 Rubin was the subject of one of Warhol's Screen Tests (filmed by Gerard Malanga). She also appeared in Heliczer's Venus in Furs, along with the Velvet Underground, and was included in a CBS news segment about the film titled "The Making of an Underground Film." More famously, it was Rubin who first introduced the Velvet Underground to Warhol, through Malanga, in December 1965.

A few weeks later, Rubin took part in a headline-making Warhol performance at a psychiatrists' convention:

On January 13, 1966, Warhol was invited to be the evening's entertainment at the NY Society for Clinical Psychiatry's forty-third annual dinner, held at Delmonico's Hotel. Bursting into the room with a camera, as the Velvet Underground acoustically tortured the guests and Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick performed the "whip dance" in the background, Rubin taunted the attending psychiatrists. Casting blinding lights in their faces, Rubin hurled derogatory questions at the esteemed members of the medical profession, including: "What does her vagina feel like? Is his penis big enough? Do you eat her out?" As the horrified guests began to leave, Rubin continued her interrogation: "Why are you getting embarrassed? You're a psychiatrist; you're not supposed to get embarrassed." The following day the NY Times reported on the event; their chosen headline, "Shock treatment for psychiatrists," reveals the extent to which Rubin's guerrilla tactics had inverted the sanctioned relationship between patient and doctor, expert and amateur. projected Christmas on Earth onto the performing Velvet Underground as part of Andy Warhol Up-Tight and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia performances, and in 1967 persuaded Allen Ginsberg to buy the East Hill Farm as a haven for poets. She helped nurse her friend Bob Dylan back to health after his motorcycle accident in 1966, "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."

Rubin's 1972 film Emunah was filmed after Rubin's conversion to Hasidism. The film features Ginsberg and was shot in London and New York. Jonas Mekas explained that it "is structured around the fate and meaning of the Jew. It's also about Naomi (of Kaddish), and Allen, and all the great rabbis of the world."

Final years By the early 1970s, Rubin was twice married. The first marriage, to Mordechai Levy, was an arranged one and ended in divorce. The second was to Isaac Besancon, a French painter and follower of the mystical teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. Rubin and Besancon first lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in a small community of newly-observant artists that included filmmaker and collagist Jerry Jofen and his wife, Ellen Gordon. Rubin later moved with her husband to a religious community in the South of France in 1973. She died of a postnatal infection in France in 1980 after giving birth to her fifth child. She was 35.