16/5/2022 'Heart of a Dog' Review: Laurie Anderson's Portrait of the Artist as a Rat Terrier - Variety

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H O M E > F I L M > F E S T I VA L S Sep 4, 2015 8:15pm PT

Film Review: ‘Heart of a Dog’

Laurie Anderson's first feature film in nearly 30 years is a goofy, lyrical paean to puppy love and an inimitable meditation on love,
memory and language.
By Justin Chang

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16/5/2022 'Heart of a Dog' Review: Laurie Anderson's Portrait of the Artist as a Rat Terrier - Variety

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Dogs have clearly become an avant-gardist’s best friend. First Jean-Luc Godard delivered a funny 3D valentine to a
pooch named Roxy Mieville in “Goodbye to Language,” and now the New York-based musician/performance artist
Laurie Anderson has woven a tide of personal stories, insights and visual-musical riffs into a more accessible but no
less singular consideration of the species in “Heart of a Dog.” While this alternately goofy, serious, lyrical and
beguiling cine-essay serves primarily as a loving tribute to the memory of Anderson’s rat terrier, Lolabelle, its roving,
free-associative structure brings together all manner of richly eccentric musings on the evasions of memory, the
limitations of language and storytelling, the strangeness of life in a post-9/11 surveillance state, and the dif culty and
necessity of coming to terms with death.

A D V E RT I S E M E N T

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Wielding a darkly playful sense of humor that cuts through any poetic preciosity, Anderson’s unexpected but entirely
welcome return to filmmaking (this is her first feature since her 1986 concert doc, “Home of the Brave”) should unleash
enough critical admiration to win over discerning arthouse-goers. After a prolific fall-festival run, it opens theatrically Oct. 21
through Abramorama before an early 2016 airdate on HBO. Anderson’s fans will also find some of the film’s elements on
display in her concurrent installation “Habeus Corpus,” which will premiere in October at New York’s Park Avenue Armory.

A pioneering figure on the New York art scene since the 1970s and ’80s, Anderson may have mellowed a bit since her avant-
garde heyday, when she made a name for herself with her innovative multimedia performances and voice-altering, genre-
bending experiments in electronic music. But her more recent work, up to and including this Arte TV-commissioned
“philosophy of life” project, has been no less adventurous in its embrace of creative forms, including a stint as NASA’s first
artist-in-residence; vocal turns in “The Rugrats Movie” (1998) and PBS’ “American Masters” documentary on Andy Warhol
(2006); a well-received 2010 album, “Homeland,” which she produced with her husband, the late musician Lou Reed; and a
“Music for Dogs” concert outside the Sydney Opera House, some of it performed within an aural register detectable only by
canine ears.

An indulgence of all things furry and four-legged is similarly front and center in “Heart of a Dog,” which, though apparently
unrelated to Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1925 communist satire of the same title, proves no less concerned with the subtler points of
connection between two species that have always regarded each other with mutual affection. The film begins with a re-
created dream sequence in which Anderson describes her intimate, almost maternal sense of attachment to Lolabelle in
mordantly funny terms (illustrated by the artist’s own monochrome ink drawings). It’s no accident that, near the end of the
film, the director supplies a moving bookend to this opening sequence by recalling her mother’s death, and the strange,
conflicted feelings of affection, estrangement and regret that it awakened.

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As metaphors go, it sounds cruder on paper than it plays onscreen. Rather than drawing simplistic formulations, the film
unspools a micro-budget mixture of animation, visual effects, 8mm home-movie clips, newly shot footage, and variously
doctored or distressed images, all of it given shape, weight and direction by Anderson’s inimitable, ever-present voiceover
and characteristically inventive use of music. It’s a style so structurally liquid and formally stimulating that it naturally invites
us to forge parallels among the various sights, sounds, impressions and anecdotes she’s assembled here.

And so, Anderson’s memory of a long-ago Bay Area hiking trip — during which a circling hawk swooped down and almost
mistook Lolabelle for an unusually large rabbit — turns her thoughts back to the very different airborne predators that struck
on Sept. 11, 2001. It’s a subject that never seems far from the mind of this quintessentially New York artist, though she’s less
interested in exploiting that day’s specific trauma than in reflecting on the innumerable changes that transpired in its wake.
She remarks on the suddenly ubiquitous presence of armed troops throughout Lower Manhattan, as well as the Dept. of
Homeland Security’s practice of recruiting dogs and sending them to be prison for bomb-squad and military-patrol training.

But just as you wonder if “Heart of a Dog” might be settling into an animal-rights polemic, Anderson’s focus calmly shifts yet
again in a work that stubbornly, charmingly refuses to settle for an obvious topic or insight. This is a movie that likes to sniff
around. A bemused reflection on the verbiage of post-9/11 unease (“If you see something, say something”) can
prompt Anderson to deliver a miniature discourse on Wittgenstein and his thoughts on the unique power of words (“The
limits of my language mean the limits of my world”). A mention of the limited color spectrum visible to dogs gives way to
green-tinted drone-camera footage. And the director lingers with particular fascination on shots of the NSA’s headquarters in
Utah (shades of “Citizenfour”), almost marveling at the U.S. government’s frighteningly unprecedented campaign of
surveillance against its own citizens.

While Anderson’s work has always been steeped in social conscience, what seems to intrigue her most about all this mass
data collection is its narrative potential — the sheer number of storytelling permutations available to anyone who might be
inclined to splice together a coherent chain of events from emails, phone calls, social-media posts, personal-information
snippets, spy-cam images and other stray Cloud particles. And so “Heart of a Dog” becomes both a demonstration and a
critique of the art of storytelling, which is to say the art of making meaning from the random effluvia of daily life, in ways that
can both deceive and enlighten.

In typically introspective fashion, Anderson turns her gaze back upon her own tendency to censor or misunderstand the
truth: When she flashes back to a serious childhood head injury that led to an extended hospital stay, she’s creeped out by
how she’s subconsciously suppressed some of the more unpleasant aspects of the experience. Another harrowing, frozen-in-
time memory from the same period, depicted in fragments of hauntingly manipulated 8mm footage, provides an emotional

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16/5/2022 'Heart of a Dog' Review: Laurie Anderson's Portrait of the Artist as a Rat Terrier - Variety

and dramatic climax of sorts, as well as a crucial insight into our sometimes faulty perceptions of how we are regarded by
those we love.

For all this, “Heart of a Dog” never becomes top-heavy or self-serious; humor has long been a defining facet of her work, and
it’s especially suited to her choice of subject here. In one of the more delightful passages, Anderson describes how Lolabelle,
who went blind in her later years, began taking piano lessons using a special dog-friendly keyboard; eventually she excelled
enough at her art to give her own concert, with the proceeds going to benefit animals in need. No fewer than six canine
performers — including Lolabelle, three more terriers, a German shepherd and a poodle — are given top billing in the cast,
higher even than Anderson’s West Village neighbor Julian Schnabel (who has a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in footage shot
from a dog’s-eye perspective).

Of all the resonant bits of wisdom that Anderson leaves us with, it’s her eminently quotable suggestion that we learn to “feel
sad without being sad” that best encapsulates the film’s melancholy but never maudlin spirit. Inevitably, this is a movie that
concludes with an extended rumination on death and the afterlife (complete with references to the Tibetan Book of the
Dead), but Anderson insists on the importance of understanding each passing as not just an occasion for grief, but as “a
release of love.” Viewers may well glean that Anderson is talking about not only her mother and Lolabelle, but also Reed, who
died in 2013, and to whose “magnificent spirit” the film is dedicated. His song “Turning Time Around,” which plays over the
closing credits, is one of a handful of stirring musical selections here (including tracks from “Heartland” and Anderson’s 2001
album, “Life on a String”) that reverberate with personal history — a reaffirmation, as if it were needed, that Anderson’s
puppy-love collage is no less a portrait of herself.

A D V E RT I S E M E N T

Read More About:

Heart of a Dog, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, New York Film Festival, San Sebastian Film Festival,
Telluride Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Venice Film Festival

Film Review: ‘Heart of a Dog’

Reviewed at HBO screening room, Los Angeles, Aug. 27, 2015. (In Telluride Film Festival; Venice Film Festival — competing;
Toronto Film Festival — TIFF Docs; San Sebastian Film Festival — Zabaltegi; New York Film Festival — Special Events.)
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16/5/2022 'Heart of a Dog' Review: Laurie Anderson's Portrait of the Artist as a Rat Terrier - Variety
Running time: <strong>75 MIN.</strong>

Production: (Documentary — U.S.-France) An Abramorama (in North America) release of a Canal Street Communications
production in association with Arte France — La Lucarne, HBO Documentary Films, Field Office Films. (International sales: Celluloid
Dreams, Paris.) Produced by Dan Janvey, Laurie Anderson. Co-producers, Cooper Holoweski, Noah Stahl, Jim Cass, Shaun
MacDonald, Jake Perlin.

Crew: Directed, written by Laurie Anderson. Camera (color/B&W, HD), Anderson, Toshiaki Ozawa, Joshua Zucker Pluda; editors,
Katherine Nolfi, Melody London; music, Anderson; sound, Mario McNulty; visual effects, Marc Boutges; drawings and animation,
Anderson.

With: Archie, Gatto, Lolabelle, Little Wille, Nitro, Etta. Voice: Laurie Anderson.

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