Clifton Childree

Clifton Childree (b. Birmingham, AL, lives and works Miami, FL) is a filmmaker, performance artist, installation artist and painter. He performs as a range of characters – from a failed Henry Flagler, or a drunken candidate for county commissioner – low, profane and crude characters with hilarious and disturbing body language, loosely connected to his study of the Japanese dance style called Butoh, in addition to the body language of silent film performers like Lon Chaney, Sr., Harry Langdon, Stan Laurel. He sometimes projected his films behind him while he was performing, and his multi-media installations often acted as frames or cases for films he made. His filmic style references Jan Svankmajer, Ladislas Starewicz, the Brothers Quay, and Guy Maddin. Like them, Childree refused inhibitions, opting instead for voracious explorations of all manner of eccentricities, in the process making films that could be in turn sublime and then utterly crude. Melodrama, scatological slapstick, stop motion animation and other early film effects are all in his toolbox.