Shiteater 11:11 minutes 1993
Originally made in 16mm, as the fourth part of the feature-length wordless psychodrama collection House of Pain.

“The final part, Shiteater, resumes the theme of art and the creative act as a spiritual transformation of physical matter. It reiterates the theme of theatricality (make-up and costume) as a sort of androgyny, but the appliance of simple devices to the face and body take on a suddenly frightening distortion of identity. Feces is again seen as material possession of the other, but the feces itself is here outrageously profuse and baroque and the eating of it is most overtly an exhibitionistic and defiant act. The lone figure in this episode performs a ritual of dressing up before going to the toilet and shits looking the camera sometimes directly in the eye. The episode ends with the angel again returning to water which again and most beautifully reflects bright glows of light.” Tom Chomont

Shiteater is a carefully hewn assault on a society bent on consuming itself, an homage to late capitalist ideals of corporate mergers and the dissolution of perimeters – state borders, regulations and individual privacies are redrawn in the light of oligarchy.

Psychodramatic in form, Shiteater features a single protagonist, Vancouver’s performance artist Andrew Wilson. Wilson’s transgressive fin-de-siecle performances have typically joined pop culture icons in onanistic rites of excess and immolation, using the body as the intersection of competing and unbearable pressures.

Here Wilson appears in two guises, first as the darkly contoured shiteater of the film’s title, painting his morning mask with the same calm deliberation as any business folk, before retiring to the privacy of his commode, loosing a fantastic amount of shit and eating it. And secondly as a birdman, feathered headdress and tails crown a genital metamorphosis which show an egg becoming a rooster becoming phallus, finally erupting in a phantasm of sperm. Both these personas are washed away in the dark of an ocean photographed during “magic hour” that threatens dissolve its protagonist in the fire of these waters before he emerges once more naked.

The film describes a circle of death and rebirth, of ecstasy and horror, as Wilson scrutinizes his own body and finds it permeable, subject to influence, penetration and transformation. If shit is also food, or the mouth an asshole, then each of the body’s functions might be read as a double sign, of affirmation and repression, its identity perimeters holding the promise of its dark double, acknowledged now in the full light of day the horror of all we’ve become.

“Through the House of Pain the Canadian director discovered his 120 days of Sodom. After three years Hoolboom returned to his already finished film in order to think about it once more and redo it (there was too much pain in the house of pain). In the new version, the picture, which is framed by psycho-horror in genre and by critics’ comparisons with the artistic hits of Genet and Pasolini, consists of four parts which are both a praise and a revolt, a synthetically paralyzing survey of all the nooks of the house of pain in which we are staying, an avant-garde anatomy of the human body. The twirls of abomination and bliss require a very tolerant viewer, the hypnotical film without words goes to the very border of what is acceptable, it is another of the films in which ethics are covered by the skin of the sensuous, instinctive, and mortal body, this vessel of excrements, urine, seat and semen. Homosexuality, sado-masochistic sexual practices, the fourth and final part of the film ‘shiteater,’ which definitively breaks the protected zone of what is considered socially unjustifiable. As if the director with the time-bomb of the lethal virus in the body (the code of our death) wanted to show (the film stands mute, it only shows) all the dark and dirty things with which his body struggles, the weight of these glands. All this would not be enough if Hoolboom’s black and white world was not being uplifted by the strange tenderness which balances out the director’s fetishist obsession to give the film something that had never appertained to it—a film is hardly ever intended to be the last movement. The long rogation of sin pushes the viewer into the defensive, s/he wants to run away from the cinema, for we simply do not want to see certain things; we know about them but being silent about them allows us to survive (or they do not concern us, we are not on the reverse side of the mirror yet). Even for this reason we consider it important to draw the viewer’s attention to the extreme nature of the featured picture.” (Petr Kubica, Jihlava Festival)