Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 13: Tue Jan 13

Christmas on Earth (Rubin, 1963) & Deux fois (Raynal, 1968): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This is a 'The Machine That Kills Bad People' screening.

Programme
Barbara Rubin, Christmas on Earth (1963), double 16mm projection, 29 min.
Jackie Raynal, Deux fois (1968), DCP, 66 min. 

ICA introduction:
A double bill of films that double. Barbara Rubin’s underground classic Christmas on Earth (1963) possesses a spirit of riotous, orgiastic anarchism. Made when Rubin was still a teenager and inspired by Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, this sexually explicit work sought to challenge the social mores of its time – an attitude captured in its working title, “Cocks and Cunts.” Christmas on Earth is a double 16mm projection that incorporates live performative elements, such as the use of coloured gels and a radio soundtrack, to create a singular and spectacular cinematic experience. Deux fois (1968) is the directorial debut of Jackie Raynal, a figure renowned not only as a filmmaker, but equally for her work as Éric Rohmer’s editor and as a programmer at New York’s Bleecker Street Cinema. Made under the umbrella of the Zanzibar Group, with the patronage of Sylvina Boissonnas, Deux fois deconstructs cinematic conventions through a series of discrete episodes. In the words of Noël Burch, the film is "an intentionally elementary meditation on certain primary functions of film, that could be said to be at the roots of film editing as such – expectations, exploring the picture, perceptual memory, relationships between on-screen and off-screen space – all explored in a series of free-standing sequence shots of perfect simplicity."

Here (and above) is an extract from Deux fois.

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