'Heart of a Dog'

Making films can do strange things to one's head. I suspect filmmakers start to grow extra spider senses, gossamer filaments that radiate out beyond their physical body, waving in the air, searching, sniffing, like trailing jellyfish streamers or cat whiskers. Or maybe great artists simply get more of these fine wires in the first place. Like water diviners, they walk around with bent sticks, looking for underground pools, vibrating when they hit them.

If ever there was a woman with the ability to tap into the subterranean flow, it is Laurie Anderson. Anderson's film essay Heart of a Dog is playing at the Vancity Theatre on the last day of this year, Dec. 31. It is a fitting way to end one cycle and begin another, since that is what the film is about. Death, that great leveler, reduces us all to fragments and memories, things caught inside the net of someone else's mind -- or in the case of film, remembered through a looking glass, visible but not touchable.

The death of Anderson's beloved rat terrier Lolabelle is where Heart of a Dog begins, but it wanders far and wide. And like any good ramble, part of the pleasure is stopping to look at the strange sights along the way, to flip over rocks and peer at the stuff underneath, to put things in your pocket to bring home with you. There is a lot packed in the film -- surveillance culture, Buddhist theory, New York City post 9/11, dog concerts, village life, family history... it is a veritable midden heap, collected and displayed by a genius Magpie.

But among the shifting plates of music, scene and animation, great boulders of story jut out. These parts of the film work on some strange primordial level, maybe because they're so strangely familiar. I don't mean the elements of a particular tale, whether it's an accident of fate or a narrow escape, but more in the way first experience works. These early stories stick in the soft mud of your childhood mind. Making the deepest and most defined imprints, they will be there forever, like the footprints of the first humans preserved in a riverbank.

Into the dark river

At age 12, Anderson jumped off a high diving board and broke her back. She spent weeks recovering in a hospital ward full of burned children, listening to loud recitations of nursery books by helpful volunteers. The story becomes emblematic of her childhood, one that she trotted out at regular intervals to explain herself. But what is most curious about this episode is what is remembered and what is forgotten. Memory is like that, and just about any human with a working heart and brain will recognize those moments when the veil lifts and the focus comes in hard and clear on what really happened. The brain has a defense mechanism to protect us from things that are simply too terrible to be understood. We use story both to access them and to modulate and control them. But sometimes they double back and take us by surprise. The shock of this feels likes someone set off a flare inside a closed room.

Anderson's film accomplishes something rare in that it touches a part of human experience that is seldom seen or felt, diving deep into a dark river to feel about for something precious. It is a brave thing. I haven't seen many films that touch the electric current that runs underneath our conscious minds, not just touch it but grab on for dear life. Alain Cavalier's film Le Paradis was also one of these. Every time I looked at images from the film I felt a strange internal surge, a tidal pull. "What the hell is this?" I thought. Like Anderson's film, Le Paradis is also made up of stories, leftover pieces of a formal education in the Greek classics and Catholic school, fundamental bits of culture that we use like oven mitts to handle white hot experience. Loss, desire, pain and finally death -- it is all story.

A friend of mine recently told me that when you get to a certain age, it feels as if you are pulling all of the people you have known and loved, and who have died, behind you. This is so in Heart of a Dog. But the film is not heavy with grief; rather, it is light on its feet, filled with humour and tenderness (a word that always weirdly makes me think of snails). The film's playful collage has its own innate pleasure. The fine whiskery things that allow you, me, we (the audience) to navigate in the dark without bumping our heads, spring to life, caressing the air, waving with invisible underground currents. They meet up with those of the filmmaker, these tuning forks of the soul, singing with the joy of assembling a jumble of pieces into a greater whole. They join us together.

The most interesting thing is how incredibly satisfying it is to simply hear someone tell you a story. A part of your brain, maybe the part that remains a child forever perks up, bright-eyed and hopeful. I remember this feeling from the dinner table, where my grandparents and aunts and uncles would sit around, bullshitting and telling tall tales. The piercing joy, the avaricious desire for the stories to never end, that sense there was a wide and wondrous world coming in like a distant radio signal. All that remains is the feeling, intangible and mysterious, like falling asleep in the car and listening to your parents' murmured conversation while the stars spiral and cartwheel through the backseat window. Everything in the great dark world, filled with possibility, alive and electric, tumbling end over end into eternity.

Please note our comment threads will be closed Dec. 21 to Jan. 3 to give our moderators a well-deserved break. Happy holidays, readers.