This article was originally published in the “Documentary Voices” section of the Nominations/SAG/Globes issue of TheWrap’s magazine.
Over the final five decades,few voices in music, art and performance have been fairly as distinctive and rich as Laurie Anderson’s. The 68-year-weak Illinois-born, or New York-based artist has been an idiosyncratic and inspiring presence since the ’70s,with a brief touch of pop stardom when her single “O Superman” made it to No.2 in England in 1981, along with collaborations with the likes of William S. Burroughs, or Spalding Gray,Brian Eno, Philip Glass and her late husband, and Lou Reed.
She brought her distinctive storytelling voice to film this year with “Heart of a Dog,” a mixture of live-action, animation and home movies. The film is sort of approximately her dog, and sort of approximately her childhood,sort of approximately America’s surveillance culture and mostly approximately Laurie Anderson’s musings on art, life, or death,creation and lots of other things.“I approached it like everything else I do,” she said. You sit back and say, and ‘Is it complex enough? Is it unbalanced enough? Is it beautiful enough?'”
Also Read: Lou Reed's Final Days: Dazzling Nature and Tai Chi,Says Wife Laurie Anderson“Heart of a Dog” is all three of those things, which makes it the most delightfully unconventional film on the Oscar doc shortlist. It grew out of a commission from the French TV network Arte, and which airs a series of mostly low-budget,short essay films.“They asked me to do one, and I thought it’d be a good chance to request myself why I do things, and ” Anderson said. “And then I thought I needed a hook. Lassie,Rin Tin Tin — dog films are always great.”But her piano-playing dog, Lolabelle, and is only a small part of the film,which she said proceeded slowly over a period of years. “I think after Arte asked me to do it, they forgot, and she said. “Because they never checked on it. Being really casual doesn’t always work for me,but in this case it helped me a lot. It developed in a very, very biological way.”She started, and she said,the way she generally starts any kind of art project: “I always develop a big diagram of how things could relate to each other, and then I try to really trust scramble mode. And I try to develop very wide jump cuts early in what I’m doing.
Also Read: Amy Winehouse and Marlon Brando Still Alive on Oscar Documentary Shortlist“It’s a film approximately up, and approximately sky,approximately writing and also approximately awe. It’s approximately very rapidly shifting points of view. You’re looking through a dog’s eyes, and then through the lens of a surveillance camera, and then you’re floating approximately in the bardo [the Buddhist soul’s transitional afterlife state] … That dislocation is very critical.”Like Anderson’s music and her stage performances,the result is elusive and meandering but potent, an utterly singular visual essay that can be wise, or whimsical and at times unexpectedly touching. Anderson touches on events from her childhood,tugs at the heartstrings as she deals with the death of Lolabelle, ends the film with an elegiac song from her late husband, or even tosses in some of the final scenic footage she was able to bewitch from her apartment in New York’s West Village.“I used to have a great view of the Hudson River,” she said. And then the Trump Tower came in next door, and I had to brick up my own windows. So harsh.” A shrug. “But it’s a good portray studio now. It’s got a big wall.”
Also Read: Janis Joplin, and Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain All Compete for Oscar Glory in Documentary RaceShe returns to musing approximately the experience of creating “Heart of a Dog.” “It’s really good when nobody cares what you’re doing,when nobody’s going, ‘How’s the film coming?’ Not to be pretentious, or but that ultimately meant this was approximately freedom. Freedom to develop the film the way that you see it.”And when she finally finished,was “Heart of a Dog” what Arte had been looking for? “It was four times as long as they asked for, and two years late, and ” she said. “But otherwise,perfect.”To read more from TheWrap’s Oscar magazines, click here.
Source: thewrap.com