The great documentary film-maker Chris Marker used visual
medium to study the concept of memory under a new light. His video essay/poem
combined unique audio-visual design and insightful voice-over to hypnotize us
and to keep in a dream state. Veteran Multimedia artist/composer Laurie
Anderson continues this experimental tradition through her poignant documentary
Heart of a Dog (2015), which profoundly explores the themes of love, loss and
death. In Heart of a Dog, Laurie Anderson staggeringly analyzes the emotions of
her self. She ponders over an instant emotion or unexpected personal events to
only find it strangely reverberate in the historical, political actions around
the world. The ability to find profound insights from life’s simple events was simply
mesmerizing to experience.
Although Anderson’s soothing voice provides us with some
clarity, the documentary’s audio-visual presentation (mixed with old 8-mm
footage, original footage, artworks, etc) looks like the vision of a person’s
distorted memory. So, as in real life, the recollection of a memory doesn’t
have a linear logic. What Anderson tries is to take each of these snapshots of
memory and provide her own philosophical critique to comprehend those memories
in a better way. The primary subject of the documentary, as the title suggests,
is a dog – a rat terrier named Lolabelle. Lolabelle is a talented canine, which was
an embodiment of love and empathy in Anderson’s life. Sometimes the dog even
seems to be Anderson’s alter ego. The dog was immensely loved and we see Anderson’s
efforts to keep the dog lively, despite its gradual vision loss. She conducts
concert for the dog and allows it to do some painting with the finger claws. It
is so touching to witness Anderson’s grief as the dog has eventually passed
away.
On one hand, Heart of a Dog is a celebration of the
Lolabelle’s companionship and an effort by Laurie to overcome the grief. While
on the other hand, she employs dream logic to fascinatingly interpret the
things that happened/happening to her with the big societal or political
changes. In an earlier passage Laurie Anderson recounts walking in the
California mountains with Lolabelle, after the 9/11 tragedy. The dog has kept
its head down leading the way. A hawk out of nowhere swooped down to catch
Lolabelle. But it swoops away thinking the dog is too big to carry. Anderson
recounts the dog’s look which she says is a realization of the prey status. She
finds the connection between Lolabelle’s look with the expression on American
faces after 9/11 (“I saw the look on Lolabelle’s face and I saw the realization
she was prey and these birds had come to kill her and they could come through
the air. And then I realized it was the same look of my neighbors in New York.
When they realized they could. Come through the air………”). It’s a well
articulated account, although for some it may seem like a ludicrously
illogical mode of thinking. But, logic isn’t the word we often use when we
ponder over memory or some past actions. The intent here is to understand the
existential state without applying a false sense of coherence.
The aforementioned intention becomes clear in yet another
personal story Laurie Anderson tells towards the end. Anderson recounts her
distressing stay in a hospital’s burn center for children when she was 12 years
old. For years, she has told about this harrowing episode to others. But she is suddenly
bestowed with a moment of epiphany. What Anderson failed to recount is the
illness that surrounded her hospital bed; the crying and screaming of
children; the beds that became empty overnight. The grim things enshrouded her
are filtered out in the story, which is only about herself (“creepiest thing about stories is that you get your story, and
you hold onto it, and every time you tell it, you forget it”). Anderson
ruminates on how we tell the stories of our lives to not only sustain our
personal experiences, but also to shield us from grim things. By applying a
coherent logic to tell our story, we design our own rigid version of a reality
in order to soothe our self. As Anderson says, ‘this is a story about a story’.
And so, the ultimate aim is to deviate from the basic human need to narrate
everything as a logical story.
The more abstract visual passages involve the drama
surrounding Laurie Anderson’s childhood (her relationship with the mother) and in
the ideas of Buddhism. There are also perfect references to philosophers
Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer and random detours into America’s
conception of surveillance state. Perhaps, the most memorable passages are the
ones where Anderson shows her unbridled love for Lolabelle. Right from the
weird dream of giving birth to the dog to Anderson vividly drawing Lolabelle’s 49
day post-death journey (according to what described in the Tibetan Book of Death),
the documentary works as intimate exploration of love and death (and the
unbreakable connection between it). As far as contemplative visual pieces go, Heart of
Dog (75 minutes) is the most delightful and hypnotic study of life in the face
of death.
★★★★
Trailer
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