Laurie Anderson pays tribute to late Lolabelle in ‘Heart of a Dog’

“Heart of a Dog” made the “short list” of 15 films to be considered for an Oscar nomination for this year’s Best Documentary Feature.

The recognition is a measure of the broadness of the term “documentary” and of the usefulness of the documentary form for the adventurous filmmaker. Unlike many nonfiction films, “Heart of the Dog” eschews a traditional journalistic approach to nonfiction storytelling. Instead, director Laurie Anderson delivers an impressionistic memoir (to use a highfalutin term) in the form of a cinematic tone poem (to use another).

Essentially, “Heart of a Dog” is a tribute to Anderson’s late beloved rat terrier, Lolabelle, an animal who, by virtue of her musician/artist/filmmaker owner, lived a charmed life as something of a celebrity in New York’s West Village, an area with “the highest density of dogs in the city,” Anderson reports.

Working with a trainer, Lolabelle learned to play or at least paw the piano; in fact, she performed in public at animal rights fundraisers. She also painted with her paws and made foot-impression sculptures in Plasticine. In other words, she was as artistic as her human companions, who included not just Anderson but also Anderson’s husband, Lou Reed, who died in 2013 at 71.

“Heart of a Dog” is dedicated to Reed’s “magnificent spirit,” but the rock-and-roll artist is barely mentioned and glimpsed only briefly, in a heartbreaking still photograph with Lolabelle. Nevertheless, his presence — which is to say, his absence — looms large in the film, alongside that of Lolabelle and such other “late” figures as Anderson’s mother and the victims of 9/11. Thus, Anderson’s movie is a meditation on mortality (“Every love story is a ghost story,” says the director, quoting yet another late great, David Foster Wallace), but it also mulls over the wariness (both personal and institutional, in the form of electronic surveillance) that has become commonplace in the wake of the fall of the Twin Towers. After Lolabelle sees her first hawk, Anderson compares the dog’s sudden sensitivity with the possibility of death from the sky to the new fear of assault from above that has infected Americans since 9/11.

The movie is presented in the form of a collage, with Anderson as a constant offscreen narrator, speaking in a measured, reasonable, reassuring voice that sounds slightly electronically altered. (Most people probably know Anderson, if they know her at all, from her minimalist 1981 electronic hit “O Superman.”) The images that accompany Anderson’s voice include footage of Lolabelle, old home movie clips, artwork created by Anderson and experimental digital animation. Despite its dog-centricity, the movie is not a tearjerker; instead, Anderson attempts to follow the paradoxical advice of a Buddhist teacher who told her to learn “to feel sad without being sad.” Nevertheless, her salutation to Lolabelle may crush the animal lovers in the audience: “Hello little bonehead, I’ll love you forever.”

This story was originally published March 24, 2016 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Laurie Anderson pays tribute to late Lolabelle in ‘Heart of a Dog’."