Coming to theatres today, Wednesday, October 21: HEART OF A DOG
Laurie Anderson’s meditation on life and loss premiered at Telluride. It has gone on to screen at Venice, Toronto, San Sebastian, New York, Adelaide, and Chicago.
Returning to film after nearly three decades, experimental performance artist/musician Anderson offers a surprisingly whimsical and sometimes hypnotic essay on mortality, inspired by her dearly departed rat terrier Lolabelle. While often focused on the dog, and Anderson’s maternal attachment to her, manifested most clearly in the retelling of a dream in which the artist gives birth to the canine, the film free associates, eschewing any discernible structure to instead move between this relationship to broader musings on loss and vulnerability, localized in a post 9/11 surveillance state, and into suggestive connections between the deaths of her mother and of her life partner, Lou Reed.
what (not) to doc 