Barbara Rubin’s 29-minute Christmas on Earth is the filmic record of an orgy staged in a New York City apartment in 1963. This double projection of overlapping images of nude men and women clowning around and making love is one of the first sexually explicit works in the American postwar avant-garde. Today Christmas on Earth generates a small but passionate discourse in avant-garde film circles; many consider it to be an essential document of queer and feminist cinema. Christmas on Earth also deserves to be located within a larger aesthetic discourse on contemporaneous art forms such as Happenings, expanded cinema, and installation. Rubin "was one of the first people to get multimedia interest going around New York," Andy Warhol said. Further, Rubin’s filmmaking practices were a type of performance and sexual agitprop that foreshadowed the emergence of critical body art at the end of the 1960s.

The couch at Andy Warhol's Factory was as famous in its own right as any of his Superstars. In Couch (1964), visitors to the Factory were invited to "perform" on camera, seated on the old couch. Their many acts--both lascivious and mundane--are documented in a film that has come to be regarded as one of the most notorious of Warhol's early works. Across the course of the film, we encounter such figures as poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, novelist Jack Kerouac, and a number of Warhol's Superstars.