Heart of a Dog (2015) Reviews

• This Film Has Heart: Perhaps Best of 2015

  helen-511222015-12-21

  In her poetic film collage essay, Laurie Anderson is more beautifully and thoughtfully herself than ever. She has had a long career, but was most well-known in the 80's as an experimental performance artist, composer, and musician who especially explored the mix of spoken word and music. Those who know her albums such as "Big Science" and "Home of the Brave" will appreciate the return of the fragmented rhythm and quizzical tone of Anderson's speech, opening with voice-over sentences such as "This is my dream body – the one I use to walk around in my dreams." Despite the film's seemingly stream-of-conscious, no-plot, hodge- podge approach, Anderson has meaningful ideas to express, and she's woven together an elegant and smartly structured tone-and-picture poem. The movie combines her personal stories and musings with quotations from renowned philosophers, ink drawings on paper, printed words, animation, scratchy old 8mm home-movie clips, new footage of landscapes, surveillance camera footage with time codes, graphic images such as computer icons, and her ingenious use of music. As always, Anderson excels at language, and here she combines various types of on-screen text with her own lyrical voice-over. I often leave a movie wanting to run home and download the soundtrack, but in this case I am yearning for a transcript. These are words worthy of reading and contemplating. "Try to learn how to feel sad without being sad," is just one of the many sentences that could use more time to resonate than one viewing allows. But one of the surprises of this project may be Anderson's sophisticated and inventive cinematography. As the film explores a variety of deaths – the death of Anderson's dog, the death of her mother, the death of her husband (Lou Reed), and the mass deaths of 9/11 in New York, it seems the movie is often shedding its own tears. Many sequences are shot through a pane of glass that is dripping with water, like life itself is crying. And then she turns footage of an ocean upside down, with the foreground still raining, so the sea that has become the sky is weeping too. In front of everything, Anderson seems to be saying, is a gentle, pervasive sadness. And yet, the movie is not even remotely maudlin. It discusses 9/11 in way that actually adds fresh insight, which seems impossible after so many anniversaries full of remembrance ceremonies, and so many other films that have also integrated that tragic event. Perhaps the strongest moment in Anderson's film is when she takes her dog outdoors in a big field and enjoys watching her run and play in tall grass and aromatic dirt, as dogs do. And the camera pans up to the bright blue sky; it is such a beautiful day. And then we see pretty white trails in the sky, moving in circles. Anderson tells us they are birds. And then she sees that they are hawks. And she describes the look in the eyes of her dog, Lolabelle, as the dog peers up and realizes that she… is prey. The dog understands that these birds have come for the purpose of killing her. And Anderson bemoans the new reality that now the dog must not only be aware of the ground and the grass and the other earthbound creatures, but also that huge, untouchable expanse of sky. The sky is now a danger. And the dog will never view the sky the same again. Cut to footage of 9/11 as Anderson compares her dog's feeling to hers, and ours, when we suddenly understood that "something was wrong with the air"; the sky brought danger and those flying planes were there for the purpose of killing us. And "it would be that way from now on." Anderson goes on to talk about the strangeness of living in a post- 9/11 surveillance state, where we are always being recorded. But she does not take the obvious path of complaining about the social injustice. Instead, she takes a clever twist and points out that all your actions are now data. And that data is always being collected, but it will not be watched until after you commit a crime. Then your story is pieced together, in reverse – footage of where you went and what you did, being viewed backwards from the most recent moment. And then she throws in a quote from Kierkegaard: "Life can only be understood backward but must be lived forward." And intermixed with philosophy, Anderson keeps her wry sense of humor. At one point, she talks about a dream in which she gives birth to her dog. She illustrates the tale with bizarre comic drawings, and then she tells us that the dog looks up at her and says, "Thank you so much for having me," as if it has just been invited to a tea party. Ha. Later she talks about her own childhood memory of a trauma and reveals how our minds naturally clean up memories, leaving out certain details, and in that way you are holding onto a story and every time you tell the story, you forget it more. Cut to the computer icon of Missing File. The associations keep piling up, and they do indeed add up. It uses a complex and intellectual style, very astutely, to access emotional and intimate realities that are difficult to reach through overt methods. This film does tell a story, in its own subtly layered way. It is sometimes a meditation on how to go on living despite despair – "the purpose of death is the release of love," but it is also clearly Laurie Anderson's own personal tale. This is a tender memoir. It's Anderson's love story, about her dog, her mother, her husband, and her city. In the most uncommon and evocative way, this film has heart.

• a poetic, thoughtful, and at times humorous meditation on impermanence and loss, by an influential American artist

  jennielivingston2016-01-29

  Brilliant memoir/essay film/experimental film about impermanence, family history, and love. If you like first-person cinema (Agnes Varda, Ross McElwee, Sarah Polley, Jem Cohen, Thomas Allen Harris, Doug Block, Su Friedrich, Jonathan Couaette, etc.) you'll love this film. If you are looking to see a traditional documentary (social issues doc; biopic; historical film) and aren't familiar with literary memoir, art installations, animation, or personal essay (either written or filmed), you may find this film difficult or confusing, as did the previous reviewer. But if you love memoir and poetry, and have been thinking about stuff like: 1) it's hard to lose beings we love 2) where do we go when we die? 3) what are the connections between big political losses and changes and smaller, more personal losses and changes? 4) what is the connection between suffering and empathy and meaning? 5) how do our own particular hardships affect how we relate to our families? YOU'LL LOVE THIS FILM. If you love humor, subtlety, formal innovation, Buddhist cosmologies, intelligence, mystery, and (yes) dogs, GO FOR IT.

• A beautiful piece of poetry on film

  jen-lynx2015-12-26

  I am a Laurie Anderson fan. I have been since her album "Big Science" was released in 1982. I remember listening to "Walking and Falling" over and over on my SONY Walkman as I walked many paths and feeling like she really got it, whatever it was. I continued to follow her, through her release of "Home of the Brave" in 1986 and saw her perform live at the Zellerbach Hall in the 90s. Her marriage to Lou Reed seemed so perfect. So, when I heard she made a movie, I had to check it out. As I left the theater, I could only ask myself, "Why did it take so long?" "Heart of a Dog" is a beautiful tribute to life, love, and the fleeting nature of time. It is everything you would expect from a Laurie Anderson movie and then some. It is not a documentary, it is a cinematic essay on loss and love and death and remembrance. It is poetry on film. Laurie Anderson is, in my mind, first and foremost a poet. She has been graced with an understanding of the power of language, not only in the actual chosen words, but in the cadence of their delivery. The influence of Burroughs is obvious. In "Heart of a Dog", she translates that poetry to imagery, mixing home movies, weird distorted images barely recognizable, to straight up film moments, it all comes together as the ultimate Laurie Anderson expression. If you are not a fan, this may not be the film for you, or it may be a gateway into the mind of a creative genius. It is not so much a film as a stream of consciousness visual essay. If you are a fan, then make all haste to see this film. It is everything you can imagine a Laurie Anderson film to be.

• Video meditation over death

  Joerg-Ruppe2015-11-05

  Now Laurie Anderson isn't really a musician, she is an artist using all kinds of modern media and her concerts are more impressive than her audio CDs. I wasn't really sure what to expect of this film and fortunately it isn't as artsy as many of the works of video artists often are are, where - as usually in modern art - you have to make sense of the material yourself, somehow; no, this is a very watchable film with Laurie spreading out memories and thoughts about her rat terrier Archie and her mother, both of which have passed away rather recently. Also of course, her husband, the rock musician Lou Reed, had died only 2 years ago so the topic of death seems a very natural one in those circumstances. Still, this is not a sad or bitter film but at best maybe a melancholic but often also a happy one with an emphasis on cheerful memories. It is a meditation on life and death spoken in her very soft singsong voice.

• Deeply personal essay/film by Laurie Anderson

  paul-allaer2016-03-11

  "Heart of a Dog" (2015 release; 75 min.) is a non-fiction movie by musician/performance artist Laurie Anderson. As the movie opens, we see a cartoon-animated Laurie Anderson inform us that "this is my dream body" and that in her dream she gives birth to an adult dog whom she calls Lolabelle. It's not long before Laurie starts reflecting on her dying mother, 9/11, SIDS, and a bunch of other things. Couple of comments: Laurie Anderson, best known for her minimalist music such as "O Superman" from the early 80s, is no stranger to movie making. Here she takes two particular tough periods in her life, the decline and death of her rat terrier Lolabelle and the decline and death of her mother, to weave a collage of images and montage of sound, supplemented by Laurie's spoken words in which she explores "the connection between love and death" (Laurie's words) and everything in between. One might call it a stream of consciousness, except that Laurie is not rambling in the least. Let me tell you. it makes for one amazing movie experience. It's like being in a dream. if not a trance, where things somehow become a lot clearer. Let me also mention that I was vaguely aware of the movie, along the lines of: "that's the documentary about Laurie's dog", and I almost did not watch the movie for that reason. As it turns out, the movie devotes only about 10-15 min. to the dog, and the movie is not even a documentary. So it was a complete misconception on my part what this movie was about (and to be honest, the movie's title only reinforced that misconception). Last but not least, Laurie's husband Lou Reed (who passed away in 2013) isn't mentioned a single time, but an excellent song of his, "Turning Time Around", does play over the movie's end titles. Please note: you don't have to be a fan of Laurie Anderson to appreciate this movie (but it certainly doesn't hurt if you are). "Heart of a Dog" showed up out of the blue and without any pre-release buzz or advertising at my local art-house theater here in Cincinnati last weekend. The early evening screening when I saw it a few days ago was not attended well (three people, including myself), and I noticed that it will drop out of the theater after today. That's a shame, as this is a remarkable movie in many respects, and by all means deserves a wider audience. If you are in the mood for something very different, all the while realizing that is a deeply personal essay and film from Laurie Anderson, I encourage you to check it out, be it in the theater, on VOD or eventually on DVD/Blu-ray. "Heart of a Dog" is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!