The festival enters the final stretch in Venice and it’s time for showcasing several more unconventional films and works that defy easy definition. Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog certainly fits that bill. The film is in competition here but it could just as well have played at the Contemporary Art Venice Biennale, which is on display across the bay from the festival.  
 
That is to say that this work by world-renowned New York based contemporary artist/musician/performance artist straddles the line between art, cinema, documentary and recording (it was originally conceived as a narrated soundscape before producer Dan Janvey collaborated with Anderson on turning it into a film).
Heart of a Dog is ostensibly about the life and feats of the artist’s long-loved and departed rat terrier Lolabelle, who is featured in the artists studio, on walks in Manhattan’s East Village, on a trip to California’s Northern Coast and even in clips documenting its own forays into experimental music.
 
Lolabelle’s real life adventures (this is a dog urbane enough to sport her own Facebook page) are really the pretext for the artist’s stream of consciousness meditation on life, psychology, spirituality and philosophy. Anderson touches on social issues as well: 9/11 and the rise of the surveillance state, questions of privacy and the NSA, the relationship with her mother and her abiding practice of Buddhist meditation and, yes, the meaning of life and death. That is not to say that the film is pedantic in the least; to the contrary, this accomplished visual and multimedia artist imbues the proceedings with poetry and humanity and themes that are both universal and personal.
 
Ultimately, among the people family and friends that the director evokes in her woven narrative, the one that is never directly named is perhaps also the one whose presence hovers most prominently. The artist’s companion and soul mate Lou Reed is barely glimpsed in a coupe of home movies and briefly appears as an actor, but it is hard not to read this paean to the loss of a beloved creature at least, in part, as an intimate tribute to Reed as well.
 
“Lou is part of this film in many ways”, Anderson confirmed here. “Lou’s spirit is very much in the film and I especially wanted to pay tribute to his fierceness. We talked a lot together about the force of expressing things simply.” It is not surprising then that Heart of a Dog ultimately is a meditation on love and death and an attempt to process how they are intertwined from the perspective of both Western and Eastern philosophies, and by a major artist for whom film is just the latest extension of her artistic expression.
Luca Celada

Anderson meets fans

Photo credit: Luca Celada/HFPA