Heart of a Dog (2015 film)

Background

Heart of a Dog was commissioned by Franco-German TV station Arte and centers on Anderson's remembrances of her late beloved piano-playing and finger-painting dog Lolabelle. Scenes range from realistic footage from the animal's life to imagined scenes of Lolabelle's passage through the bardo. The dog was trained by Elisabeth Weiss. The film also features reflections on life and death, including Anderson's experiences in downtown New York after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Release and reception

Heart of a Dog was screened in the main competition section of the 72nd Venice International Film Festival after premiering at Telluride Film Festival on September 4, 2015.

Heart of a Dog was released to theaters on October 21, 2015 and received widespread critical acclaim. Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating in the 0–100 range based on reviews from top mainstream publications, calculated an average score of 84, based on 20 reviews. Based on 70 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, the film received a 97% approval rating from reviewers, with an average score of 8.1/10; the site's consensus read, "Of a piece with much of director Laurie Anderson's idiosyncratic output, Heart of a Dog delves into weighty themes with lyrical, haunting grace." The film was nominated for Best Documentary at the 31st Independent Spirit Awards, and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature on December 1, 2015.

Soundtrack

A soundtrack album of the same name was released by Nonesuch Records on October 23, 2015. It featured audio, music, and spoken word pieces by Anderson from the film. In a four-star review, AllMusic critic Mark Deming said it was "an album only Laurie Anderson could make, even as its sense of joy and tragedy set it apart from her best-known work", while Andy Gill from The Independent found Anderson's observations on a variety of themes "by turns whimsical, sinister, sad and funny as well as surprisingly educational" on what was "a deeply moving soundtrack". Writing for Vice, Robert Christgau gave the record an "A+" and deemed it her best work because it "accrues power and complexity" with repeated listens, "75 minutes of sparsely but gorgeously and aptly orchestrated tales ... about life and death and what comes in the middle when you do them right, which is love." He later named it the best album of 2015 in his ballot for The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll.