Heart of a Dog

Synopsis: Multimedia artist Laurie Anderson reflects on her relationship with her beloved terrier Lolabelle.
Genre: Documentary
Director(s): Laurie Anderson
Production: Canal Street Communications
  4 wins & 12 nominations.
 
IMDB:
7.1
Metacritic:
84
Rotten Tomatoes:
96%
NOT RATED
Year:
2015
75 min
Website
1,021 Views


This is my dream body,

the one I use to walk around in my dreams.

In this dream, I'm in a hospital bed.

It's like a scene from a movie

you've seen a million times.

The doctor is holding a small pink bundle.

And he leans over the bed,

and he hands me the bundle.

"It's a girl," he says.

"Isn't she beautiful? Look."

And wrapped in the bundle,

I see the little face of my dog,

a small rat terrier named Lolabelle.

And no one says anything like,

"You know, this is not a human baby.

You just gave birth to a dog."

But I'm so happy.

I put my head to her forehead

and look into her eyes.

And it's almost a perfect moment,

except that the joy is mixed

with quite a lot of guilt.

Because the truth was

I had engineered this whole thing.

I had arranged to have Lolabelle

sewn into my stomach

so that I could then "give birth" to her.

And this had been really hard to do.

Lolabelle wasn't a puppy.

She was a full-grown dog,

and she had really struggled.

And she kept barking

and trying to get out,

and the surgeons kept trying

to push her back in

and sew things up.

It was really a mess,

and I felt really bad about it,

but it was just the way,

you know, things had to be.

Anyway, I kissed her on the head,

and I said, "Hello, little bonehead.

I'll love you forever."

I'm standing in the room

where she was dying.

She's talking in a high new voice

I've never heard before.

'Why are there so many animals

on the ceiling now?" she says.

What are the very last things

you say in your life?

What are the last things you say

before you turn into dirt?

When my mother died,

she was talking to the animals

that had gathered on the ceiling.

She spoke to them tenderly.

"All you animals," she said.

Her last words, all scattered.

Different trains,

places she'd always meant to go.

"Don't forget you're in the hospital,"

we kept saying.

She holds up her hand. "Thanks so much.

No, the pleasure is all mine."

She tries again. "It's been my privilege

and my honor

to be part of this experiment,

this experience with you

and your... and your family.

And it's... it's been...

It's been...

Tell the animals," she said.

"Tell all the animals."

Is it a pilgrimage?

Towards what?

Which way do we face?

Thank you so much

for having me.

As a child, I was a kind

of a sky worshipper.

This was the Midwest,

and the sky was so vast,

it was most of the world.

I knew I had come from there

and that, someday, I would go back.

What are days for?

To wake us up,

to put between the endless nights.

What are nights for?

To fall through time

into another world.

I live in downtown Manhattan

next to the West Side Highway.

In September 2001,

after the Trade Center fell,

everything was covered with white ash.

For months, lines of trucks

moved up the highway,

carrying the twisted metal debris

from the towers.

Out at the end of the pier,

there's a strange,

Assyrian-looking building.

And during this time,

FBI speedboats began to dock out there.

It was the beginning of the time

when cameras began to appear everywhere.

And everything was so loud

and such a mess.

I tried to get out of town

as much as I could.

I decided to go to California,

up to the northern mountains...

with my dog, Lolabelle.

The idea was to take a trip

and spend some time with her

and do a kind of experiment

to see if I could learn to talk with her.

I'd heard that rat terriers

could understand about 500 words,

and I wanted to see which ones they were.

It was February,

and the mountains were covered

with tiny wildflowers.

And such a huge tall sky

and very thin, pale blue air

and hawks circling.

Every morning,

we walked down to the ocean,

which took most of the day.

And what happened was, more or less,

beauty got in the way of the experiment.

It was just so beautiful up there

that I forgot the whole project really.

It just slipped my mind.

Most days, the walk to the ocean

took several hours,

and we would just goof around and lie down

and have snacks of carrots.

Now, rat terriers are bred

to protect borders,

so Lolabelle was always on the job.

She would trot in front of me

on the trail,

doing a little advance work,

a little surveillance.

Now, occasionally,

out of the corner of my eye,

I'd see some hawks circling

in this very lazy way,

way up in the sky.

And then one morning,

suddenly... for no reason...

they came swooping down

right in front of me.

Dropping down through the air,

their claws wide open,

right on top of Lolabelle.

And then they swooped back up

and dropped back down.

I realized that they were in the middle

of changing their plan.

This little white thing

that had looked like

a tiny white bunny from 2,000 feet up

was turning out to be

just a little too big

to grab by the neck.

And they were making their calculations,

figuring it out.

And then I saw Lolabelle's face.

And she had this brand-new expression.

First was the realization

that she was prey

and that these birds had come to kill her.

And second was a whole new thought.

It was the realization

that they could come

from the air.

"I mean, I never thought of that.

A whole 180 more degrees

that I'm now responsible for.

It's not just the stuff down here...

the dirt, the paths,

the roots, the trees...

but all this too."

And the rest of the time

we were in the mountains,

she just kept looking over her shoulder

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Laurie Anderson

Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson (born June 5, 1947) is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She became more widely known outside the art world when her single "O Superman" reached number two on the UK pop charts in 1981. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she developed a talking stick, a six-foot (1.8 m) long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds.Anderson met Lou Reed in 1992, and was married to him from 2008 until his death in 2013. more…

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Submitted on August 05, 2018

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