Program 7: Film and Performance

Happenings: One
Raymond Saroff, 1962, 16mm, 23m

Meat Joy
Carolee Schneemann, 1964, 11m

Chumlum
Ron Rice, 1964, 16mm, 26m

Christmas on Earth
Barbara Rubin, 1963, double 16mm, 30m

This program includes Raymond Saroff’s Happenings: One, an invaluable record of the ten “happenings” staged by Claes Oldenburg in an East Second Street storefront; Meat Joy, Carolee Schneemann’s seminal work of filmed “kinetic theater,” in which the nude bodies of eight performers meld with an assortment of materials (paint, paper, art tools, raw meat, poultry, and fish) in a confrontation with social taboos and cultural repression; Ron Rice’s Chumlum, a polychromatic, texturally rich dreamwork featuring the cast of Jack Smith’s Normal Love; and Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth, a major work of expanded cinema that uses a double-16mm projection and live radio to conjure, in Rubin’s words, a “cross-section of psychic tumult.” Meat Joy courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).