Heart of a Dog

Lau­rie Anderson’s voice has the qual­i­ty of a med­i­ta­tive yoga instruc­tor. Dur­ing Heart of a Dog, she speaks pre­cise­ly and calm­ly over a col­lage of expres­sion­ist images, as if to hyp­no­tise the view­er into a per­pet­u­al dream state. The result is a mov­ing essay film that lulls you into a sen­so­ry-laden trance. In this head­space, we are giv­en the free­dom to con­sid­er sto­ry­telling and mem­o­ry in a new light. Call and response ques­tions pro­vide oth­er­world­ly assur­ance. ​‘What are days for? To wake you up. What are nights for? To fall through time.’

Cov­er­ing a lot of philo­soph­i­cal and emo­tion­al ter­rain in a mere 75 min­utes, Ander­son con­tem­plates every­thing from post‑9/​11 New York City, the ​‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’, Kierkegaard and Wittgen­stein. But her beloved rat ter­ri­er, Lola­belle, and how she per­ceives the world, remains the essen­tial piv­ot point. Curi­ous, loy­al, and always up for a good time, the canine plays a cen­tral role in the film’s exam­i­na­tion of death and per­se­ver­ance, becom­ing a spir­i­tu­al con­duit to what Ander­son calls, ​“liv­ing in the gap between the moment that is expir­ing and the one that is arising.”

Rid­dled with tan­gen­tial threads, manip­u­lat­ed film stock, and a wel­ter of super­im­posed images, Heart of a Dog swirls togeth­er colours and tex­tures like rag­ing rapids. Water droplets slide down panes of glass. CCTV footage numbly tracks every­day cit­i­zens. Oppos­ing styles don’t just attract auto­mat­i­cal­ly, but Ander­son proves a mas­ter of plac­ing them togeth­er to feel less dis­joint­ed. She manip­u­lates footage of home movies, and then ani­mates it, pro­vid­ing it with new life and elas­tic­i­ty. Her per­spec­tive, like the one she imag­ines Lola­belle to be expe­ri­enc­ing, favours mal­leabil­i­ty over lim­i­ta­tion. This approach comes to fruition when Ander­son tells the sto­ry of her mother’s deathbed ram­blings, and when she begins to grap­ple with Lolabelle’s late-life blind­ness and degen­er­at­ing health.

Lan­guage becomes the great uni­fi­er in Heart of a Dog. Anderson’s nim­ble words cas­cade togeth­er, gath­er­ing momen­tum and mean­ing through jar­ring edits and clash­es of imagery. As Lola­belle pass­es on, Ander­son becomes her shaman-like guide: ​“You are not alone in leav­ing this world,” she says. Through it all we get a glimpse at unselfish love, one woman’s strug­gle to release the pain rather than see it as a sym­bol of self­ish regret. ​“Every love sto­ry is a ghost sto­ry.” Ander­son believes in the pro­fun­di­ty of this David Fos­ter Wal­lace quote. It’s why her film is just as much about the loss of her hus­band, leg­endary singer Lou Reed, who died of liv­er dis­ease in 2013. His dynam­ic ener­gy can be felt in every sin­gle frame. Maybe that’s why Ander­son, a self-described ​“sky wor­ship­per,” spends so much time look­ing up, recon­fig­ur­ing the def­i­n­i­tion of absence to mean some­thing more hope­ful and timeless.

The film’s illu­so­ry qual­i­ties are always deeply per­son­al, nev­er more so dur­ing Anderson’s intro­duc­tion to one of her final anec­dotes: ​“Let me tell you a sto­ry about a sto­ry.” With­in this lay­ered con­struct, ghosts need com­fort too, and the film’s last gasp sug­gests that she is guid­ing Lola­belle toward a new begin­ning. Death becomes her, and all of us even­tu­al­ly. But to para­phrase Reed, that’s just the inevitabil­i­ty of time turn­ing us around.