Heart of a Dog
First screened in October 2015 / Reviewed in September 2024 / Most recently screend in October 2024
Director: Laurie Anderson. Documentary evoking the life and death of Anderson's dog, as an aperture into reflections on storytelling, memory, politics, and intimacy. Twitter Capsule:
Griefs for dog, nation, parent, partner unpacked with warmth, lucidity, and weirdness. Not a funeral. A passageway.
Second Capsule:
Laurie Anderson's dog playing piano is the new Denis Lavant playing accordion. All films should halt for one of Lolabelle's benefit concerts.
VOR:④
Great double-bill with Goodbye to Language. Seminal addition to the swelling field of animal studies. Magical wonder from a master of other arts.
I love at least a few of Jean-Luc Godard's 21st-century essay films, like Notre musique and Goodbye to Language and The Image Book, all of which arguably advance the form more than Laurie Anderson's Heart of a Dog does. I'd written "probably" and then downgraded to "arguably," because as soon as I said this, I wondered why I did. I realized I didn't even believe what I wrote, which was only intended as a bridge to what I really wanted to say, which is that Godard's essay films are self-consciously learned, rigorous in both intellect and rhetorical/artistic shaping. They also convey an acute sense of their own brilliance, and since they do at least strike me as brilliant, and I don't know who else would have made them, I'm mostly okay with that. You don't need to spend much time with Godard or his work to sense his greater priority on brilliance than on kindness or humility, and that's also okay with me, since we need and benefit constantly from the contributions of people like that, and it's impressive to have even one of those qualities. Still, that's not my favorite ranking of the three.
Viewers of Agnès Varda and JR's Faces Places likely remember the ice-cold episode when those two decide to drive many kilometers out of their way so that Varda can make a surprise drop-in on Godard, her colleague and maybe quasi-friend-ish person of more than half a century. When she arrives, he won't even open the door, much less present his face to her camera or submit to a spontaneous role in her puckish road movie, which is a whole other breed of essay film from Goodbye to Language. Brilliance over kindness again, as ever. But also, autonomy and integrity over self-negating obedience. For all of Varda's increasing self-performance in later years of kooky great-auntish whimsy, that brilliant artist wielded her gamine routine in, I felt, an ever pushier way that bordered uncomfortably on the self-regarding and casually dictatorial. Faces Places offers its own evidence: e.g., Varda winsomely asking dock workers to fulfill her wondrous mental tableau of these women perched several dozen meters in the air atop their own shipping crates, and then railroading into compliance the one who protests, out of a deep fear of heights. We're doing pixie-ish art here, God dammit! Now climb this ladder made of seashells!
I start here because Laurie Anderson's movie Heart of a Dog also works by semi-circuitous association, and because among this trio of astonishingly durable one-of-a-kind artists, Anderson is the one who persuades me of her kindness and humility, not just alongside but as part and parcel of her brilliance. Sure, she's given to self-study and self-projection, like most artists and like plenty of people (including yours truly). Still, she's able to make her art Not About Her even when it's mostly about her. Heart of a Dog is generous with insights (spiritual, interpersonal, philosophical, historical) that apply far outside the speaker's own experience and whose value and pertinence well exceed the text. I'm not positive it's "better" than other masterworks of the very loosely-defined essay film, like Varda's The Gleaners and I or Godard's Notre musique (or Akerman's No Home Movie), but at minimum it's every bit their equal, despite having a fraction of the scholarly or film cultural cachet. And I absolutely like it the most, which is not nothing.
Heart of a Dog is the warmest, funniest, saddest, most questing, most conversational, most animal movie ever made for, to, or about an animal—and that's true even apart from the West Coast trip taken by East Villager Laurie and her rat terrier Lolabelle, so that the human can start learning how to "talk" to the dog. It's supremely evocative of a dog's high-paced but pause-filled rhythms of movement, as well as its scent-driven, low-to-the-ground, attention-deficient phenomenology, though Heart of a Dog is also sufficiently unrushed and contemplative to convey how it's about dogs, not just made in their image.
The movie is also about dying, and living, and living after dying, and art-making, and post-9/11 New York, and families, and security states, and loneliness, and love. Its mellifluous but somehow unsentimental narration (by, of course, Anderson) is the most enveloping voiceover track I can think of in any movie, but she retains her singular persona, such that we aren't necessarily "identifying with" her, nor she with us. She is bracingly clear with received wisdoms, as when her Buddhist teacher espouses the value or even the need of learning "how to feel sad without being sad." She is also breathtakingly honest, totally if tactfully plainspoken, in expressing thoughts you're not supposed to express, as when Anderson confides that rushing to her dying mother's bedside was made trickier by the fact that she didn't love her mother.
Both the visuals and the sound mix are aggressively eccentric at times, more subtly slippery at others. The sustained if stretchy eulogy for Lolabelle is entirely in earnest while also slowly revealing itself as a Trojan horse for a more conflicted eulogy for Anderson's mother... and in the closing credits, that reveals itself to be a Trojan horse for an almost wordless eulogy for her husband Lou Reed, then recently deceased. Anderson obviously Knows Things. She comes across as a friend you would call if you needed counsel, even if some of it slightly eluded you, or got a little cute. Failing that, you can meditate on this movie for more direct, 24-hour counsel.
Every shot of Lolabelle convinces me that she, too, knew things, whether or not it was the exact set of knowledges that Anderson ascribes to her. And this dog was also a sculptor, abstract painter, and recording artist, and if you don't believe that, or if you do, or if you'd forgotten those scenes, or if you'll never ever forget them, today is the day to (re)watch Heart of a Dog. The movie is both a photo album and a phosphene—a word I didn't know till the movie taught it to me, though it names something we've nearly all experienced. It's the cinema's Tao of Pooh, a sattva of sound and screen, a series of expertly wrought and revised Notes app entries assembled into a secular scripture for our times, our lives, and our afterlives. Grade:A–
