Heart of a Dog (Heart of a Dog)

In 2011, renowned multidisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson suffered the loss of her beloved rat terrier Lolabelle as part of a succession of family deaths that also included her mother and her husband, the legendary musician Lou Reed. In this strikingly personal essay film, Anderson uses her close bond with Lolabelle to anchor her reflections on diverse subjects, with her own melodic voiceover narration overlaying a complex tapestry of images (including Anderson's own animations, 8mm home-movie footage, and lots of dog photography). Bringing to mind Chris Marker's essay film Sans Soleil in its connections of disparate themes and images, Heart of a Dog is dreamy, comic, philosophical and intensely emotional – like Anderson herself, it defies easy categorization.

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"The limits of my language are the limits of my world − from Laurie Anderson’s network of impressions, Wittgenstein’s recognisable thought emerges, all so that, peeling off the sediments of a comprehensive appearance, she would step further, into the prelinguistic, into intuitive knowability. Anderson identifies the primordial animality as the vestibule of the shared universe, synesthetically transforming images, sounds, and eventually words, into poetic consonances. The poignant experience of attachment and loss is moved from the confinement of personal turmoil into the work of the film, while the process of breaking and layering perception hinders the distinction of reality and imagination. The materiality of the film is a substitute for memory, a concrete expression of its rearrangement with the goal of new appropriation. The paradox of the caught state: every time you tell a story, you are closer to forgetting."

- Iva Rosandić