Heart of a Dog: Laurie Anderson
Heart of a Dog: A Film By Laurie Anderson
Interview by Liane Buck
“Every love story is a ghost story”
HEART OF A DOG began three years ago as a short personal-essay film commissioned by the Franco-German public television station Arte, as part of a series featuring artists talking about the meaning of life and work. Laurie Anderson was in Paris at the time, presenting a solo performance that featured her rat terrier, Lolabelle. The commissioner Luciano Rigolini suggested, “How about some of those stories about your dog? That’s philosophy, no?”
“Hello, little bonehead. I’ll love you forever.” So begins HEART OF A DOG, creative pioneer Laurie Anderson’s wry, wondrous and unforgettable cinematic journey through love, death and language. Centering on Anderson’s beloved rat terrier Lolabelle, who died in 2011, HEART OF A DOG is a personal essay that weaves together childhood memories, video diaries, philosophical musings on data collection, surveillance culture and the Buddhist conception of the afterlife, and heartfelt tributes to the artists, writers, musicians and thinkers who inspire her.
HEART OF A DOG is a meditation on the experience of death. Mingyur Rinpoche, one of Anderson’s Buddhist teachers, sums up the approach when he says “You should try to practice how to feel sad without actually being sad.” “My goal with the center section of the film, the scene that depicts the bardo or the Tibetan afterlife, was to juxtapose jarring, rapid-fire images —a cartoon dog, a train, a data collection center and several heavily processed scenes from the first half of the movie as a way of representing some of the ways we think,” Laurie Anderson says. “These are some of the ways we associate, remember and predict.”
HEART OF A DOG arrives in tandem with Anderson’s landmark HABEUS CORPUS installation, premiering at the Park Avenue Armory in early October. Each work has a version of the story of Lolabelle and 9/11. The Armory installation features a live video feed and three-dimensional film pieces. This is a collaboration with a former prisoner who tells a unique and difficult story.
