Directed by:
Laurie AndersonScreenplay:
Laurie AndersonComposer:
Laurie AndersonCast:
Bob Currie, Sasha Grossman, Kurt Gutenbrunner, Willy Friedman, Evelyn Fleder, Jenni Muldaur, Julian Schnabel, Dustin Guy Defa, Jason Berg, Heung-Heung Chin (more)VOD (3)
Plots(1)
Heart of a Dog is a personal essay film that explores themes of love, death and language. The director's voice is a constant presence as stories of her dog Lolabelle, her mother, childhood fantasies, political and philosophical theories unfurl in a seamless song like stream. The visual language spans animation, eight millimeter films from the artist's childhood, layered imagery and high speed text animation. The director's signature music runs throughout the film in works for solo violin, quartets, songs, and ambient electronics. The center of Heart of a Dog is a visual and poetic meditation on the bardo, the forty nine day period after death in which identity is shredded and the consciousness prepares to enter another life form. A Story About A Story envisions her ordeal in the hospital when she broke her back as a child and how the story became her way to understand the relationship of real events, authority, and faulty memory on the creation of stories. Theories on sleep, imagination and disorientation are framed as questions about time and identity. Is it a pilgrimage? Which way do we go? (Venice International Film Festival)
(more)Reviews (3)
Subjectively: unbearable. Objectively: anachronistic. If you think your dog is an artist, that it talks and you'd have preferred to take him out of your womb as a baby (and are uncomfortable with personal data tracking to boot), I give you permission to hate me.
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The internet is a movie! The castration of Eastern European philosophy into one-sentence lessons, shots of children and nature through all sorts of primitive filters, free association, context-free dictated trivia culled from some kind of "20 Things You Didn't Know About the World Around Us"; there are even mobile phone videos of a dog playing the piano. This is exactly how I imagine the FB wall of a wealthy housewife somewhere in the suburbs after her adult children have left home. Yet the whole monologue is told in a creepily affected Štěpánka Haničincová style. I'm pretty convinced that if someone sat me down in a coffee shop across from Laurie Anderson, I'd slit my wrists from boredom within five minutes.
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I don't like associative films because even though they have an idea within them - or they could have one - the way they are presented bothers me so much that I don't actually have any proper experience from the film itself because I don't enjoy watching it. Moreover, I'm not sure if the associations here are actually a bit self-serving. At least in places they sound strange.
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