Student Academy Awards Series Part 8: In Living Memory - Dori Walker

In Living Memory, dir. Dori Walker

“What’s the line between forgetting and releasing?”

Dori Walker is an interdisciplinary artist, director, and creative producer based in Harlem, New York.  Dori received her Bachelor's Degree in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University graduating with honors for her thesis film, In Living Memory, which is a winner of the 51st Student Academy Awards in the Alternative/Experimental category. In Living Memory is Walker’s experience of being a Black woman in America, and an exploration of her family, their neighbourhood, and our collective memories.

Walker’s exploration begins in her neighbourhood of Hamilton Heights, Harlem, around 137th Street. Over beautiful photographs of the local residents, hair salons, and food markets, reminiscent of street photographer Khalik Allah, Walker’s grandmother’s voice reminisces about how things used to be in the neighbourhood, and how much the years have changed them. “This used to be your neighbourhood,” Walker says to her grandmother, who sighs “Who would believe that I would come back?” The city changes so quickly it is impossible to keep up with; the difference between generations is like a totally different city, where the past city only lives in memory.

Each section of Walker’s wide-ranging, yet immensely personal essay film uses a different style and a different mix of media to get her important and moving message across. Interviews, archival video/audio, voices, textual quotes, and archival photos combine and recombine in ways that are alternatively heartbreaking, funny, and incendiary. Grainy black and white photos are mixed with on-screen text from Frantz Fanon, thoughts about the women that left and the women that stayed are delivered over montage of family photos played side-by-side with news clips of Grace Jones, past meeting present in a melting pot of images and ideas.

Centering the photo and video mediums, Walker works intimately with sound, music, and the tension of still and moving image to re-imagine the existing visual catalog of quotidian Black life with an emphasis on oral histories and the archive. “In my solitude, you taught me with memories” sings Billie Holiday in her song (In My) Solitude, over which Walker reminisces about the love between herself, her mother, and her grandmother. In her reflection, Walker uses texts from Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and bell hooks with reflections from American academic Saidiya Hartman, voicemail messages from Walker’s father and grandmother, and clips from the seminal film Daughters of the Dust by director Julie Dash, combined in a swirling reverie on the Black feminine.

“People are the most precious archives; the most valid source is a primary one, and that’s the human mind,” Walker explains at the opening of the films heart, a section called “Montserrat,” named for volcanic Caribbean Island that her grandparents called home. Walker wants to listen to the people who were there, people who can recall the past, confidently. But because of her grandmother’s declining health, and her grandfather’s memory loss, memory is reality reduced to a dream, surviving only in the mind. So many things you only realized were important, Walker learns, when you couldn’t remember them anymore.

In Living Memory is blisteringly, movingly personal—entire sections of Walker’s collage are made with her grandmother’s photo collection, proving her point that even when people are long gone to us, they are still there in memory. In Living Memory climaxes with “in my fact like a slap,” a hard-hitting montage, with music also produced by Walker, which samples songs from more recent Black history, including Solange, MIKE, Erykah Badu, Liv.e, black midi, and Deniece Williams. Usually, we relegate ourselves to eras of our lives—past is past, now is now, but with In Living Memory, Walker brings her past to our present—and she is an artist we will surely be looking out for in the future.

Review by: Joshua Hunt