Heart of a Dog

April 2, 2016 · The Tennessee Theatre · 11:00 A.M.

Directed by Laurie Anderson · 2015 · Q & A with Anderson after screening
In Laurie Anderson’s plainspoken all-American observational-autobiographical art, voices and harmonies and rhythms and images are juxtaposed and layered, metaphors are generated, and the mind of the viewer/listener is sent spinning into the stratosphere. It’s been nine years since her last film and almost 30 since her last feature. Heart of a Dog is her response to a commission from Arte, a work of braided joy and heartbreak and remembering and forgetting, at the heart of which is a lament for her late beloved piano-playing and finger-painting dog Lolabelle. Life in the neighborhood—downtown New York after 9/11, the archiving of surveillance records in ziggurat-like structures, Lolabelle’s passage through the bardo, recollections of deaths and near-deaths, terrors personal and global, sad goodbyes and funny ones, dreams and imagined flights, acceptance: Heart of a Dog is as immediate as a paragraph by Kerouac, as disarmingly playful as a Cole Porter melody, as rhapsodically composed as a poem by Whitman, and a thing of rare beauty.