Words//Gemma Ross
Twitter//@fooals
Twitter//@fooals
HEART OF A DOG: ★★★★★★★★★½ (9.5/10)
Starring - Laurie Anderson, Jason Berg, and Heung-Heung Chin
Starring - Laurie Anderson, Jason Berg, and Heung-Heung Chin
I took myself to my local independent cinema with no idea what to see, and with a quick flick through the booklet, I decided that 'Heart of a Dog' sounded the most interesting. But then, to be honest, anything sounds more interesting than Kung Fu Panda 3. I genuinely think that I came out of that cinema a different person after seeing this film. For the first 15 minutes, I sat wondering what I'd let myself in to, seeing as the entirety of it was so far made up of weird animations and snippets of pictures. There's no real storyline in actual fact, no scripting or any of that special cinematography or set design. The entire thing, is a collage of memories and artwork that go way beyond your imaginative process, to the deep dark depths of the human mind. Played out like a passage through Laurie Anderson's past memories, HEART OF A DOG captivated me instantly for being so completely unique and dream-like. It's a fantasy that I can only describe by telling you to think about your hallucinative dreams or floaty imagination, with the majority of it taken over by Anderson's narration as she recalls memories, the meaning of life, and many other outlandish things that you've never seen (or heard) before in a film. The narration fits the clips and artwork to a T, there's no need to focus fully on them as they're just sort of...background noise. Anderson's constant speeches run through your head the entire time as you seem to somehow stay focused on them, but then again, it's probably because there's not a lot else to focus on. All I know is that I've never seen anything else like this, but I adore it.
The simplicity of a topic so complex astonished me in that one single person could create such a mass of perfection in a 75 minute space. It's a true 'art film', probably even the most artistic film I've ever seen. If you don't have a similar mindset to Anderson, I feel that you'd suffer in attempt to watch HEART OF A DOG. There seems to be a lot of embedded life lessons, and talk of 9/11, which makes it that little bit more peculiar. A very Kubrickan style and structure leads the film to the few penultimate scenes where nonsensical text is thrown across the screen, and it seems as though it's never going to end. Not that I want it to. It's when the screen fades to black that I realise that the other 3 or 4 people occupying the cinema haven't moved yet, and are also just looking around in a dazed confusion. It's a film that I will truly never forget, and I now thank my instincts for picking out that one from the array of flicks in the booklet. If you're artistic, linguistic, or even just a fan of incredibly well made films, there's nothing else that you should see first, before HEART OF A DOG.