Clifton Childree , an inspired tinkerer and visionary filmmaker chatted candidly with me amidst the piles of rotting wood and nails, old doors, cast-off furniture, filthy rope, tattered canvas and busted wrought iron in Locust Projects. All this rusting, shabby raw material lay there, inert, like Frankenstein’s monster, awaiting the master’s life-giving ministrations, to be transformed into his Dream Cum Tru. Childree is clearly in his element, improvising kiosks, a shooting gallery, a rickety proscenium stage, and various other carnival attractions, on a condensed scale.

An analog artist in the digital era, Childree adores the herky-jerky motion of black and white silent film, its stagey, hokey lighting, 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. To say Childree is a lo-tech devotee is an over-simplification. Home-made is perhaps a better term. His affection for simple hydraulics and basic mechanics comes from a deep love affair for the carnival midway, for the broad laughs of vaudeville entertainments. It’s the hand-cranked and slap-stick that gets him going. When I ask him about the decision to work in 16mm film as opposed to video, he says “I shoot with a Bolex camera made in the 50s or 60s. It just never breaks down.” Childree made his first super 8 film at nine or ten years old. Even earlier than that, he made flipbooks, daydreaming during school. We talked about kindred spirits, the filmmakers Jan Svankmajer and Guy Maddin. Like them, Childree’s films are an arena for his uninhibited eccentricity. They seesaw between the sublime and the profane. Shamelessly employing melodrama, blunt humor and sight gags, Childree’s films are doused liberally with scatalogical slapstick such as bare asses, flying poop, over-sized dicks. The quaint toilet humor of It Gets Worse, a recent work, unleashes repressed urges and drives that would give a Freudian analyst a field day. And then there is the fairytale wistfulness of She Sank on Shallow Bank. His feature film The Flew is a singular work, a story that exists entirely within the confines of a carnival ride.

He guides me through the work in progress all around us.

CC: This is the opposite of how I usually work. Usually I build the sets and I make a film. After I’m done, I tear the set down. I don’t normally invite people in to see the sets.

MW: It all stays behind the scenes.

CC: Yes. When people watch films, they don’t take in all the work that goes in to the background details. In my films, it’s all fabricated.

MW: Where did all this stuff come from?

CC: Monday is bulk trash day in my neighborhood.

MW: And you’re building it all by yourself?

CC: It’s harder for me to plan it out and get someone to help me than just to do it myself. When I get into this mode of building, it’s like tunnel vision. I can’t even listen to contemporary music. I have to listen to music from the time period of this carnival I’m constructing.

MW: So you’re improvising, responding to the material?

CC: I’m not so interested in the logic of any decision. It’s not intellectual. I just get this feeling and I go with it.

MW: So all this stuff gets revived, gets a second chance at life. Where did this love of all things outdated come from?

CC: Well, I grew up antiquing with mom, hunting for old stuff in Northern Florida. Mom had a player piano, and we would visit a warehouse for her to get more player piano rolls, and it was full of arcade games. The summers I spent with my grandparents near Mobile, Alabama, were also incredibly magical. There was an abandoned carnival there. Rickety piers, neglected and decayed buildings near Mobile. The nautical stuff comes from my grandpa. He built boats, was in the Navy, lived on the bay. I was always around ports, sea walls, wharves. These are the ultimate transition zones, between human life on earth and the life under the sea. The edge where those two worlds meet.

MW: So nature exerts a pull over the man-made.

CC: Well, a lot of this wood has termites. It’s decayed and distressed by nature. It never feels like a sad thing to see an abandoned building. It’s just more interesting. It’s rotting, returning to the soil, releasing itself from its structure, asserting its natural self. Deteriorating is a transition. Transitions in films have so much emotion. In old films, you can feel it when that circle closes in on lovers, for example.

MW: So, what’s happening here in Dream Cum Tru?

CC:The films that are projected in Dream Cum Tru look like they’ve been playing too long. The people have all left, but the electricity just keeps going. The movies keep playing on top of these dirty, rotting boards. These little sets have just been sitting here, slowly sinking in. That’s where all the magic happens. There’s a shooting gallery with an antique gun, a fun house maze with confusing turns and mirrors, stairs and a slide that lands the visitor in a weird, undesirable spot. It’s about getting lost, and maybe getting found too. That moment when someone enters an old place and gets disoriented, and they let go of the handrail for a moment, and really get lost. I love dark rides. I’ve been wanting to do this for years.

MW: A dream come true!

CC: There’s a scary element too. Unsafe buildings, decrepit construction, phantoms, dark urges. I once imagined a widow’s house ride as a chair in front of a sewing machine. The widow sits alone sewing, and as the sewing machine wheel turns, a dildo comes up from the chair she sits in. You know, her guy is lost at sea. Or imagine a coin-operated whorehouse. I’d be blown away! Sexual machines that look like normal household things - that’s something.

MW: Mechanical objects have a life of their own.

CC: It’s the parts clicking behind the scenes, simple, repetitive.

MW: Like a watchmaker. And in the project room?

CC: Well, that’s a movie theater, and I play the projectionist, still hanging around playing the films occasionally. I get to interact with the film, swap around the title cards, mess it up, sync my action to what’s happening in the film. I might play a pump organ I have.

MW: That sounds like true vaudeville, getting the audience to laugh and feel complicit in your pranks - and all to music!