Reintroducing audiences to Laurie Anderson's prolific and wide-ranging career as a musician — "O Superman (For Massenet)" was her experimental hit song from 1981 — and an artist ("Habeas Corpus" is a recent installation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City) is necessarily reductive. As Anderson recently wrote in The New Yorker, "I am what is known as a 'multimedia artist.' I chose that description because it doesn't mean anything. Who isn't multimedia these days? But it allows me to work in many different ways — music, writing, performance, film, electronics, and painting — without provoking the art police, who love to tell artists to get back into their category." In directing her new documentary Heart of a Dog, Anderson has conceived an avant-garde and plotless self-portrait. And, like most of her oeuvre, the film embraces many genres and defies restrictive definition.
The movie begins with a dream of giving birth. It's the kind of dream that would bring a smile to the ghost of Mary Shelley. The camera pans intently across one of Anderson's paintings in search of the visual details being described in the dream. Anderson, after decades of recorded and live performance, has mastered the art of direct address. The inflections of her line readings, her aspirated enunciations, make a beeline for the audience's unconscious from the moment she starts to recount the dream: "I had arranged for Lolabelle to be sewn into my stomach, so that I could then give birth to her." If Lolabelle were human, a baby girl, then the dream might sound merely odd. But the stakes are raised when we learn that Lolabelle is Anderson's beloved rat terrier.
Of course, she didn't give birth to Lolabelle, though some maternal urge — the act of creation — grew inside of Anderson as she assembled this elegiac film about loss and grief and sadness. But this isn't Marley & Me, in which a beloved animal's every scratch and bark is outlined in pastel sentiment. Anderson, in addition to directing and painting, also composed the soundtrack. It hums and whirrs in the background, emitting voices from an organic machine, a god-box that's captured the ancient Grecian songs of Aeolus and Aurora and Iris, as if the storms and turbulence of the firmament had been digitally recomposed as plangent lullabies. So Anderson can tenderly intone, "Hello little bonehead / I'll love you forever" while layering the dream scene of the birth with blurred, watery footage and those melancholy sounds. Like Francisco Goya's painting The Dog, which is referenced in the film, the portrait of Lolabelle expands upward, above and beyond the story of one small animal's life and death.
"The film was really about writing in a way. I've just been realizing that as I watch it, because, for example, in that one, like any dream, you're the architect of everything," Anderson explained during a recent visit to California — where she once attended Mills College — for the film's West Coast premiere.
She's also describing the job of a film director. And, in a similar way, what a mother does for her children: she is the architect of the first home (the womb) that a child lives in. It's no coincidence then that Anderson includes her own mother in the film. On her hospital deathbed, Anderson's mother asks, "Why are there so many animals on the ceiling? Tell the animals. Tell all the animals... It's been a privilege. Thank you so much for having me," and then she takes her leave. But the Anderson family archives of photos and Super 8 films are presented with dark-hued filters, lenses dripping with rain, abstracted to what could be anyone's memory of mourning.
In the scenes that follow, Anderson constructs a story that shares some techniques with stream-of-consciousness novels, providing memories and anecdotes outside of a linear chronology. But her associative powers remain precise, bold, and vivid. She tells the story of adopting Lolabelle. It is, in part, the story of the terrier's original owners, who divorced and had to let their dog go. Though she describes the ex-husband's despair in great detail, Anderson doesn't mention his name or his relationship to her. Instead, the story expands the film's narrative scope by inviting a thoughtful lesson from her Buddhist meditation teacher: "'You should try to learn how to feel sad without being sad,' which is actually really hard to do. To feel sad without actually being sad."
As she recites the line a second time, suddenly the controlled reserve of Anderson's approach to loss comes into focus. But Anderson further clarified the concept by adding, "There are a lot of sad things in the world. If you pretend they're not there they're going to come and find you, they're going to bite your head off. They're there; that's just reality. My teacher's idea is just to accept it and not get so tied up in it. He's a guy whose whole philosophy is basically, 'We're here to have a very, very, very good time.'"
Toward the end of the film, after exploring the complicated response to sorrow over the deaths of her mother, her friend Gordon Matta-Clark, and, eventually, Lolabelle, Anderson invokes another Buddhist exercise called the Mother Meditation. "You use it when you can't feel anything. You try to find a single moment when your mother truly loved you without a single reservation. Then you imagine that you've been everyone's mother, and they've been yours."
When asked to elaborate on the purpose and meaning of the meditation, Anderson, sounding like the most compassionate mother-figure, explained, "The film is called Heart of a Dog because it's about empathy. It's about love and death and being able to feel things for others. It's about taking that single moment, and it could be a millisecond... It's there and you just have to find it and try to generalize it and move it out into the world of something that you could do and that has been given to you and you can give."
Heart of a Dog is saturated with ghosts. Anderson admits to having seen three of them in her life. One was Matta-Clark, but who were the other two? She gave an answer worthy of the Sphinx: "I love having secrets in the film. I just have planted a few small things visually and in terms of the stories, too." The film's final image is of her late husband Lou Reed, who died in 2013. His face is elongated and planted sideways against the ground; Lolabelle is lying beside him with her front legs stretched out. His song "Turning Time Around" plays out over the credits and stops as he and Lolabelle fade to black. For a millisecond, she shares her ghosts with us, the way a loving mother would, with open arms.
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