When Laurie Anderson was asked to make a film about her own life philosophy, she initially resisted. “I thought: I don’t have one, and if I had one I definitely wouldn’t want to put it in the shape of a film and foist it on people,” the artist explains. “That didn’t appeal to me.” But then it was suggested she begin the project by focusing on animals, which have often been a leitmotif in her work. Anderson got on board, and the result is the poetic documentary “Heart of a Dog,” which opens this month. The film begins with a dream sequence of Anderson
giving birth to her beloved terrier Lolabelle and moves through questions of love and death, along the way summoning
the ghosts of Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, David Foster Wallace, and her friend Gordon Matta-Clark. “It’s about forgetting and resurrecting, which is another way
to think about stories: bringing things back to life.”Anderson is aware of how tricky it can be to talk about her film. “I’m a snob.
I come from the self-indulgent, nerdy art world,” she laughs. “I like to use distancing methods.” But there is a rawness, she admits, that can’t be denied. “That’s really what it’s about—how do we love and
how do we die?” she says. “But I’ve never heard anybody talk about it that way. I think people are too shy to say something like that.” ARTINFO discussed the film with Anderson while her new terrier, Wilson, rested contentedly on her lap.Filmmaker Pedro Costa once commented, “Some people say to make films is
to remember, but I think we make films to forget.” Is “Heart of a Dog” about remembering or forgetting?It’s about both, of course.In the film you talk about losing a piece of a story every time you tell it.How do you tell a story? When somebody asks, “Who are you?” you drag out your
one or two stories about who you were
as a kid, the stories you’ve told a million times. Sometimes you find yourself in
the middle of telling it going, Is that who this was? Or is it just some kind of story? So I started thinking of how stories are collected and told. That’s why the National Security Agency came into the picture, how and why those particular stories are being recorded. How stories are structured.The images also bring to mind remembering and forgetting, especially the decaying home movie footage from your childhood that you incorporate. That was very wild, suddenly to have images that go with certain stories, because I’m somebody who likes to tell stories that evoke images. I often don’t use images because I think people come up with much better mental imagery than I can provide. So if I use imagery in a show, it tends to be hypnotic, generic, and loopy, nothing to do with dramatic action.Can you talk about the animated dream sequence of you giving birth to your dog, Lolabelle, which opens the film?I actually shot it as a gooey operation. It was so much fun—but it was a little
too funny, you know? I thought, How could you meet this narrator, who’s going to
be talking nonstop? I didn’t want to
be in the film, so I thought, how about introducing the narrator as a cartoon? We did super crude animation. And then took the drawings three more steps, made them wavy, made them bending, Lichtenstein-like dots, and then put them on very rough paper. They’ve been through the mill several times.Your narration is cleverly balanced between being personal and detached.I do use the word I in the film, and it does refer
to me as a person, but it’s
a trick. I’m not interested
in telling you my life
story, but in asking questions about things. So I use myself almost as a character who wanders around in
a series of questions. It’s very personal and in other ways very neutral. The narrator is dancing around playing
different roles. The very first
thing I say in the film is, “This is my
dream body.” This is not exactly a person talking to you. This is sort of a dream, in the way that you can be the main character in your own dream but also an observer.Which leads to more questions.When I look at the script there are a lot
of question marks. There are very few exclamation points. One of my favorite quotes from Jean-Luc Godard: every story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Just not in that order. It’s been my mantra. I don’t know about your life, but mine does not have a plot. I’m really just improvising here. I mean, I know people whose lives do have plots. They have it mapped out in some ways, some quite specifically. Then all you have to do is live it out. It’s almost always disappointing.Because it’s bound to fall short?I don’t think it’s even about whether it falls short or exceeds. What happened to the adventure of living? We get pushed into scripts so easily. That’s also what this film is about. What is your story? do you have one? Maybe it doesn’t work so well to just live it out.In the film you talk about the ghosts in your life. Your late husband, Lou Reed, is not mentioned, but his presence is still deeply felt. I started this film when he got sick. Then
I stopped working on the film completely and didn’t know if I was going to get back to it. I finished it after he died. Of course, he’s the guardian angel of the whole thing. It’s very much about his spirit. And I liked his having the last word. He was very good at making short, beautiful imagery. I’m much more all over the place. And we talked about that a lot. He would go, “Why don’t you just say what you mean?” And I would say, “Well, metaphor, maybe?” I would try to get him to be a little more expansive sometimes and he tried to get me to be more succinct. That was a lifelong conversation.Do you see this film as a continuation of your previous work or a break from it?It’s just another form. It will be familiar to people who know my work. People’s imaginations are wonderfully powerful, and if you give them enough room, musically and visually, they will fill in all kinds of things. I wanted the voice to be the viewer’s voice. I wanted to weasel my way in somewhere between their eyes, so that I would be them. A lot of this film happens in peoples’ own minds, more than other films. The
viewer is very much a participant in the creation of this.
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