Bird S**t is a young man’s film. I have no idea how old director Caleb Wood is. He could be seventeen for all I know, or he could be older than me. I tried looking him up online and the internet has been less than helpful. The IMDb lists his career as having begun in 2010, which would certainly indicate youth, but it could also mean he was a late bloomer, and those can make the best artists. I have no idea. So I’ll go back to my original thought and simply add this: Bird S**t is a young man’s film regardless of Wood’s age.
For forty seconds we watch a kaleidoscope of still pictures of bird droppings. Sometimes they take very definite shapes and move, other times these shapes take on more esoteric forms and perhaps they’re meant to represent something and perhaps they represent nothing and we’re simply seeing what we want to see, faces in the yellow wallpaper so to speak.
In a way, it does make you think about how our waste products resemble us. Archeologists will be the first to tell you that the best way to get a good idea about what a civilization was like is to go through their garbage. Zoologists, likewise, will tell you that the best way to get to know an animal is to look through their fecal matter.
All of which brings us back to Bird S**t, in a weird tortuous roundabout way. I don’t like the title. It’s too slam poetry, coffeehouse and hip. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against profanity. I f*****g swear, a lot. Mark Bell will vouch for me on that. I just don’t like it in titles and in art. An artistic expression is like a holy prayer to the very soul and spirit of the imagination. You don’t swear in a prayer. That’s crass.
Other than what I hope comes off as a rather gentle complaint about the title this is fine and fun. It was made by someone who tossed out an idea out there to see if it would stick. That’s what art is, and Bird S**t is art, in both the figurative and literal sense.
