In the opening seconds of composer Laurie Anderson’s new film, an animated version of Anderson—which she identifies as a "dream body, the one I use to walk around in my dreams"—narrates a macabre but hysterical vision the artist once had, concerning her rat terrier dog, Lolabelle (whose eventual death is just one spoke in the film’s wheel of concerns). From there, it isn’t long before Anderson’s wry voice—half speaking, half singing—pivots to a vivid, wrenching memory of her mother’s death. As a director, Anderson is similarly discursive: making the briefest of references to her late husband Lou Reed in one moment before shifting to a discussion on the evolving way that Homeland Security officials communicate to New York’s citizens (and tourists), in the post-9/11 era.
Anderson’s film opened Wednesday in a select number of cities, ahead of a 2016 broadcast on HBO. The musician’s longtime label, Nonesuch, is also releasing a near-complete rip of the film’s sound design as a soundtrack. (Though, caveat emptor, it’s best heard after a viewing of the film itself.) This week, after I arrived at Anderson’s downtown New York home, she took me into her studio, where we talked about the film while sitting next to a pair of the modified electric violas that have been an iconic part of her four-decade career. The following excerpts have been edited lightly for clarity.
Pitchfork: This is quite a bit different from your first film Home of the Brave, where the soundtrack can be enjoyed as a discrete work outside of the film itself.
Laurie Anderson: Oh yeah!
Pitchfork: How did the requirements of the "essay film" style change your approach to scoring—or improvising—when you were creating the sound design?
LA: It’s not like a record. Each song doesn’t have to illuminate the last one, or have anything to do with it! One of the reasons I used strings is it really frees you to work in a more polyphonic way with the sound. As soon as you put a beat there, it’s either "on the cut", or preceding the cut, or remembering the cut. So when you don’t have that and you’re streaming through shots, your eyes are able to do much more rhythmic things. And that’s really interesting to me, because [Heart of a Dog] is really for a wandering eye that’s looking around the frame. And I tried to use words in that way, that would worm their way into the back of your mind. And a lot of this film, I hope, takes place there: on the level of hearing constant language. And it’s also falling apart—so that’s the reason the second story in the film is my mother’s deathbed speech.
She was a very formal person, and she waited until her eight kids show up—and then she stands up, sort of like at a microphone, going, "Thank you all, for coming." And we’re all like: What the hell? She’s hallucinating, all of her senses are shutting down really fast. She’s dying—and she sees all these animals. She’s talking to them. Then it’s back to talking to history, the family, saying goodbyes in a very formal way. And throughout that, the language is just shredding into a million pieces.
Pitchfork: It’s through telling some pretty personal stories—including about your relationship with your mother—that you also discover the ways that you’ve distorted your own history, by repeating it so much over the years.
LA: The fallibility of language, which is throughout the film, is a big part of the story. What I guess I’ve been most surprised about is people going, "I couldn’t believe you said that about your mother." I really tried in this film…I mean, it is about the structure of stories. But it’s also about trying to find some truth in them—and what does that mean, when you misremember them or you tell them too often? Or when they get all warped?
Pitchfork: There’s a graceful, abstract movement between your personal narratives of grief—concerning the death of your husband, or your mother, or your dog—and then your meditations on the changes in American culture since 9/11. When in the process did you know you were going to be taking such big thematic strides: talking about the surveillance state, as well as, you know, your dog learning to play piano, after going blind?
LA: Arte [the film’s commissioning entity] is kind of notorious for doing, like, super-abstract art films. Train the camera onto a candle and, you know, talk for 20 minutes. And that’s the film! And I love that kind of film. I’m a total sucker for those. I love Chris Marker. [Heart of a Dog’s eventual] producer was at a talk I was giving about the recent death of my dog, and he said, "Why don’t you do that"? And like a lot of things it was very organic, you know? I thought: I’ll add some other short stories, and see what happens.
[It came together] when I included the story of Lolabelle. Here’s, like, a dog who’s kind of a West Village see-and-be-seen dog. And when I took her to Green Gulch in California [after 9/11], I realized what happened was that even though she came from the West Village, when the hawks came down, in the back of her dog brain she knew exactly why they were there. Nobody had to say, "These hawks are dangerous." No. They’ve come to kill me. And I thought, "Oh my god, I’ve taken my dog all the way across the country to teach her fear. Great. Congratulations!"
And then I started thinking about what happens in a surveillance culture, in terms of framing and profiling and telling a story about who you supposedly are. Defining you. It happens all the time: You brand yourself, whether it’s for your Facebook page, or whatever. You’re telling a little story about who you are. In the same way you would tell a thumbnail sketch if somebody says, "What kind of kid were you?" And you know two or three stories you’ll haul out about "I was shy" or whatever. "I was a punk". And they’re not meant to really tell somebody what kind of person you are. It’s social glue.
But these profiling things don’t go that far either. For example, you buy something on Amazon. Two seconds later: "You liked this, you’re gonna like that". You go, Wait a second, that was a gift. I don’t think you know me. It’s a little more complicated than that. But that’s how that story is built and then pushed onto you. I’m sure a lot of people have had that feeling of being totally misidentified, starting from junior high school. It gets thrown at you, and you have a hard time scraping it off.
Pitchfork: After Lou’s death, you took about a year off in the middle of making the film. How did you know you were ready to return to it?
LA: It was so on and off. I kind of put some stories together, then shot a bit. Then stopped for a year. It was always sort of hobbyish. Maybe when I put the sound on, that was the speediest it got. I tried to keep it really organic, and at a leisurely pace.