Abstract
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.
Highlights
Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (1963-1965) 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
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
Summary
Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (1963-1965) is one of the most transgressive and provocative films of the North American avant-garde.
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