The first feature film by Laurie Anderson, the musician, performance artist and icon of the 1980s musical avant-garde, is a collage of expressionist sketches, animated ink drawings, text passages, home movies and new film footage that show roads and landscapes, usually from a dog’s perspective. As such, the protagonist of this essay is Anderson’s terrier Lolabelle, who, like her husband Lou Reed, passed away during the preparation and initial shooting of the film. Reed himself makes a cameo appearance as a veterinarian that sees Lolabelle. Heart of a Dog arose as a visual meditation about life, death, memory and forgetting, but also about 9/11 and the following ubiquity of the military and surveillance cameras in the American cityscape. In one scene, Anderson reminds herself of a stroll long ago in which Lolabelle was attacked by birds, which turns into a reflection on modern dangers of terrorism in the New York sky. Anderson dedicated the film to Lou Reed and gives him the last word while the final credits roll with a melancholy declaration of love in the form of his song Turning Time Around: “What do you call love? Well I call it Harry, Oh…. Turning time around, that is what love is.” And that is what Anderson masterfully achieves with Heart of a Dog.
