Red Grooms

A silent screen-type comedy starring Edwin Denby as Hemlock Stinge, the unlovable billionaire.

“Happy with his luscious daughter Aurora in a rustic setting, Professor Borealis has devised an improved brain and is ready to transplant it. The humor is tenderly black. Burckhardt's fusion of documentary-type photography with fairytale storyline is nearer Keystone than avant-garde with its visual honesty and particular virtuosity.” — Edwin Denby

A rapid montage collage featuring Jack Smith and a Warholian kiss.

An animated short about a man who finds a cat that turns into a lion. The lion becomes a famous singer who is kidnapped by gangsters. Uses animated cutouts.

A young man's struggle with his sexuality overtakes his life, driving him deep into his subconscious where guilt and fears of physicality chase him still further. Cornered by an intangible terror, he realises he must either break out or break down.

Artist Red Grooms and photographer Rudy Burckhardt’s playful homage to George Melies’ “Trip To The Moon” features exaggerated set designs, costumes and larger than life characters.

"Fat Feet", eight months in production, is a pop-art view of life in the big city, complete with a fire-fighting episode and various street scenes. Three dimensional figures and real actors were shot by Grooms both on location and within sets.

Grooms' sculptural masterpiece "Ruckus Manhattan" took thirteen months to contruct. It was originally meant to encompass all of Manhattan Island up to the Cloisters, but time and money ran out of Midtown Manhattan. The work was desinged for 88 glass-enclosed space with thirty-foot high ceilings. To prepare for this huge environmental sculpture "celebrating" in Karen Cooper's words, "the gritty glamour and chaotic beauty that is New York City," Red and Mimi Grooms hiked and rode through Manhattan, making sketches and taking photographs. Then they collected collaborators and went to work, using tons of hardware, paints, elastic, steel, and fabric.