A probing look at life and morality
Laurie Anderson’s new film is an oddly lighthearted work that is felt, not understood
Mere words really aren’t up to the task of describing the strange, surreal beauty and poetic depth of Laurie Anderson’s fascinating new feature, Heart of a Dog, so it’s almost a relief to hear its creator declare the idea that language is one of this semiautobiographical film’s central themes.
“One of the reasons that this is a film is it’s very much about the fallibility of words and stories,” says the veteran multimedia artist and experimental musician from New York City. “Of course, I’m talking about myself and my mother and my dog and my friends, but those are just ways to talk about how we make this stuff up, what happens when you repeat it and when you forget it, how that story gets made and also how real it is. You can start believing your own words pretty easily.”
Heart of a Dog is definitely a work that one feels rather than fully understands, though, just like the intellectually elusive topics of life, love, death, dreams, memory and the bond between human and pet that Anderson touches on so tenderly.
Anderson’s deadpan narration, which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever heard her one real “pop” hit “O Superman,” is there to steer you through the thing, yes. But mostly her violin-and-electronics soundtrack and a watery blur of images — many shot or animated or exhumed from the Anderson family’s own archives—leave it up to viewers to connect the film’s philosophical dots themselves.
Death, in particular, weighs heavily upon Heart of a Dog. It could be viewed from one simplistic angle, in fact, as an overly arty, 75-minute eulogy to Anderson’s late rat terrier, Lolabelle.
The passing of that beloved, keyboard-playing canine companion, however, really just serves as a catalyst for much probing, thoroughly Buddhist meditation upon her own life and mortality, as well as upon the losses of several human beings dear to her heart.
Architectural deconstructionist Gordon Matta-Clark gets a fond mention for a “wonderful death” spent reading aloud to his friends for 24 hours, for instance.
Anderson’s mother addresses unseen “animals above the ceiling” during a deathbed speech to her eight offspring early in the film, thereby unintentionally supplying a daughter — “touched by the effort she was making to put things into words at that point and also how words were completely inadequate to what she was trying to say” — with one of Heart of a Dog’s thematic threads.
Recently departed husband Lou Reed, meanwhile, flickers spectrally into the frame three times without ever actually being named until a dedication appears as “Turning Time Around” plays over the closing credits.
All of this begs the question of whether Heart of the Dog — which premiered in September at the Toronto International Film Festival and returns to the TIFF Bell Lightbox on Friday — functioned as a cathartic sort of grieving mechanism for Anderson. She doesn’t think so. “I suppose that understanding how your ‘self-work’ works helps a lot, but I don’t think I made this as a way to do that,” she says.
“I never really start out to solve problems, in the same way that I don’t think, for example, that art that is political is any better than art that isn’t.
“And also there’s the question of ‘Do you think art makes the world a better place?’ To me, that just seems like a crazy, 19th-century way to think about it because you have to think about: ‘Better for who? Better for you and your friends? Better for the art world? What are you talking about? Is it curing you and your own grief? And how could you do that, anyway?’ ”
Its mortal preoccupations aside, Anderson has made an oddly lighthearted film that, she hopes, also celebrates “life and love and that kinda thing” in the face of the inevitable, unknowable void. And she’s right in pointing out that Heart of a Dog is no less death-obsessed than most of the more marketable box-office fodder out there.
“I don’t know, is it more about death or less about death?” she says. “I’ve been going around to some film festivals and looking at how much death is in the other films, and it’s been a lot. Counting them in Black Mass, there’s a lot of them . . . “When you think about how much death is in most films, it’s really kind of amazing. And it’s also followed by kind of nothingness. You know, somebody gets strangled and it’s on to the next scene. That’s it.”