Clifton Childree
Miami resident Clifton Childree is a filmmaker/artist who in 2003 completed his six-year solo feature film project, The Flew, which Cashiers Du Cinemart Magazine named as one of the top 50 Midnight Movies made in the last ten years. In 2004 Childree received the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship and presented an installation of The Flew at the Miami Art Museum. His recent projects include She Sank on Shallow Bank, a stop-motion animated/live action dance film, Something Awful, a slapstick comedy/gore film co-commissioned by the Miami Performing Arts Center and the Miami Light Project for their 2006 Here and Now Festival and It Gets Worse made with funding from his 2007 Legal Art Native Seeds Grant. Childree is a featured artist in the book Miami Contemporary Artists. Childree was the first recipient of the Hilger Artist Project Award and in September 2008 after working for 2 months installing at Locust Projects in Miami, presented his life-sized amusement park installation, Dream-Cum-Tru.
Film still from It Gets Worse
Statement
An analog artist in the digital era, I adore the herky-jerky motion of black and white silent film, its hokey lighting and the hiss and crackle of phonograph records. All these rich textures are anathema in the present moment that worships hyper-smooth seamless cinematography and state of the art CGI illusions. My affection for simple hydraulics and basic mechanics comes from a deep love affair for the carnival midway, turn-of-the-century arcade, and the broad laughs of vaudeville entertainment. It's the hand-cranked and slapstick that gets me going. To say I am a lo-tech devotee is an over-simplification, home-made is perhaps a better term. I started making my first super 8 films at nine years old and earlier than that made flipbooks while daydreaming in school. My kindred spirits are the filmmakers Jan Svankmajer, Starewicz, the Brothers Quay, and Guy Maddin. Like them, my films are an arena for uninhibited eccentricity. They seesaw between the sublime and the profane while shamelessly employing melodrama, blunt humor, and sight gags. My films are doused liberally with scatalogical slapstick such as bare asses, flying poop and over-sized dicks and their quaint toilet humor unleashes repressed urges and drives.