MIFF 2024 Film Review - All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

Images courtesy of Common State.

A quietly ambitious work sure to attract allegations of pretension, Raven Jackson swings big in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. The film is almost entirely non-linear and features very little dialogue, jumping around events in the life of African American woman Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson and Charleen McClure playing her at different parts in her life) in Mississippi. Foregoing traditional narrative structure, the film is instead tied together by its focus on the physical sensations and rhythms of life as we experience it.

Jackson’s lofty goal of capturing sensations and feelings traditional outside the boundaries of film puts her in the company of a long line of experimental filmmakers. Director Stan Brakhage once said the goal of his approach to filmmaking was to “untutor the eye”, to reduce the clarity and opacity of human reception as such to return the viewers’ experience to that of a child seeing the world for the first time. How many colours could a person see in grass if they didn’t already know about green? Language is an essential part of encoding and understanding the world but that understanding can become constrictive; Wittgenstein said that “the limits of my language define the limits of my world” but the focus of filmmakers such as Jackson and Brakhage is in the possibilities that lie beyond it. 

The key difference between the approach of Jackson and avant-garde filmmakers of the past is the formally traditional qualities of her filmmaking. It’s an aspect sure to give the film a commercial potential that alluded previous experimental cinema – as evidenced by it being picked up for distribution by A24 – but it’s an element that occasionally undercuts the film’s goals. Where filmmakers such as Brakhage experimented more directly with the materials of film, Jackson never strays far from traditional film production. Many of the shots are artfully composed and shot, but the film only really shines when it foregoes that dogmatic approach to filmmaking. One of the film’s most affecting sequences is the one shot of a tearful goodbye that most atypically, foregoes focus on the actors faces, instead lingering on their hands wrapping around each other.

Jackson’s reluctance to include more formally experimental filmmaking techniques  makes more sense when considered in the context of the film’s unique relationship to human perception. Any nonlinear film dealing with a person’s life would naturally be expected to contend with the fragility and ephemerality of human memory, but the vignettes of Mack’s life are depicted with a lucidity that runs counter to that impulse. Instead, All Dirt Roads is focused on the sensation of touch: a parent’s hand, the precise contours of their face, the colour of their lipstick. Elements essential to the human experience that so often get lost in the construction of personal narrative.

In this sense, the film’s abject refusal to anchor narrative or use dialogue serves an important purpose. The focus is shifted from the reconstruction of her life in terms of events, to the direct emotional and physical feelings that occur in the moments they are happening. The wordlessness is not meant to obfuscate or confuse, but rather to refocus the film on the ineffable aspects of this woman’s life.

As with any work attempting something as lofty as recreating the ineffable textures, rhythms and complex emotions of life, Jackson doesn’t always connect. An extended conversation between Mack and her sister betrays the film’s established grammar of silence for a sequence that fails to generate emotional weight. It’s the quieter moments that the film comes alive in: moments like Mack watching her mother get ready for a party, with a careful attention paid to the affect the colour and texture of her mothers lipstick does get at some of the inexpressible feelings of early childhood.

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All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt screened as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival, running in cinemas and online August 8th-25th.

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