Images do most of the talking in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, the moving and masterful directorial debut by Raven Jackson. They are strikingly precise and evocative images too, that communicate far more than mere words could get across. It’s as though Jackson, wishing to present a tapestry of the life of a black woman in Mississippi primarily between what appears to be about the 1960s and 1990s, realized she couldn’t sum up such a thing in dialogue. The feelings around what she needed to express were so potent and abstract, she had to translate them another way -she needed to translate them in any way she could.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is singularly one of the most powerful films of 2023, as it in largely non-verbal snapshots dances between moments in the life of Mackenzie or “Mack” (Kaylee Nicole Johnson, Charleen McClure, Zainab Jah) as she navigates loss and love and self-discovery. We’re introduced to Mack as a child, fishing with her father, admiring the seeming glamour of her mother, soon crushing on a neighbour boy Wood -and then we glean from episodes throughout the years her varied feelings and experiences related to these relationships.
Mack’s life is not shown to us in instalments of much sustained duration; the snippets themselves are not particularity dramatic -they’ll be subdued or inauspicious- and yet highly consequential on a personal level. A slight scene of Mack’s mother (Sheila Atim) demonstrating how to skin a fish will come back in Mack and her sister Josie (Moses Ingram) teaching daughter Lily to do the same; a romantic kiss between a young adult Mack and Wood(Preston McDowell) on a hike juxtaposed with her child-self being taught to practice kissing on her hand. And then giving way to more meaningful moments: Mack the child watching helplessly as her family house burns, Mack the mother cradling her pregnant belly in the bathtub, Mack the elder taking in nature by a creek, the sounds of birds and the wind a cacophony around her, as she passes her hand through the water and dirt -just as she did as a child.
Dirt…and water. Two vital elements. An early scene sees Mack and her mother digging for dirt along the side of a road. Later her grandmother explains its symbolic weight. Dirt being what we all come from, that we must “find” the right dirt as ourselves and each other -and it is something that Mack will carry with her throughout her life, proudly declaring her child is made of dirt, and water. The water fosters the dirt, gives life to it and to everything else. Perhaps it is why Mack likes being out in the rain. Perhaps it lends comfort to a life tainted by some misery and regret.
It is a life in which an absent mother and the trauma of her death casts a long shadow that dissuades Mack from motherhood herself, a choice which comes with its own loss of what might have been a great love. But it is also a life where some contentedness is ultimately found in spite of this, in which a sense of meaning is ascertained, even if it is vague to all but Mack (and perhaps Jackson). And all of it is communicated richly by an artist who sees cinema as less of a page and more of a canvas -discarding conventional tools of dialogue and linearity to broach that kind of deeper sensation the girls’ grandmother imbues in them. Jackson reminds us of the power of visual storytelling. Really, we don’t need words to know what Mack is referring to when as a teenager she asks her sister if she ever wonders “what it would feel like” mere minutes after we saw her as a child grieving the death of her mother. Or the symbolism of the sound of rain over a grown Mack and her father (Chris Chalk) looking out on a sunny field in the aftermath of Josie’s wedding. Or of course one of the key scenes of the film where we see Mack and Wood reunited as adults long before seeing the reason for their split and in their casual minimalist conversation the fathoms of sadness at the lost opportunity for love between them. There is an unspoken need to hug and it lasts a few minutes as Jackson lovingly fixates on the little details of their embrace, and their hands most emphatically.
There are a lot of shots of hands in this movie, we almost see more detailed hands than we do faces -and in all manner of actions: grasping, clutched, clasped, outstretched, and held, especially held. An extremely evocative image (one of many in the film) is that of an elderly hand held by two young ones, the contrast in their complexions vivid in the tight framing. Jackson taps into that eternal symbol of love with a kind of reverence; she’ll linger on it, invite you to consider the profound emotion that comes out of this simple mode of connecting people to one another, to homes and traditions as well as to loved ones. To Jackson it appears touch is the primary essential sense, and so the hands are the most important features we have for interacting with the world and each other. She demonstrates that plainly with her prolonged fixation on them even sometimes through spoken dialect. One senses the primacy she sees in the work of the hands, the context of time and place that forces you to consider the lineage of this motif -both the generations of toil and bondage that such black hands were made use of, and also the solidarity, dependence and connectivity forged out of that uniquely shared cultural trauma. Mack does not openly dwell much on the miasma of black American history and identity, but it shapes her nonetheless.
The movie is edited with a subtle brilliance. Sections are linked by themes sure, and a couple very nice match cuts. The general flow pertaining to this is chronological, with digressions to other points in time mere bursts, and yet at the birth of Mack’s daughter Lily -whom she will give to her sister to raise, Jackson inverts this trajectory in a way that evokes sense memory. Her maternal circumstances conjures up the tenderness of her mother when she was an infant, the love she showed her evolving into the affections she felt later for Wood and subsequently the circumstances that broke them up. Love and loss are interconnected in a way that for Mack is both beautiful and heartbreaking. So too is the cyclical story she finds herself ensconced in, passing on the wisdom and perspective her grandmother did. Tradition is an important touchstone the movie argues, especially in a community like this -Mack at one point cast literally at the end of a long succession of elder black women and men.
Perhaps I make it sound impenetrable, pretentious or showy, but the movie is not any of these things. In fact it comes across decidedly humble in its approach. Though I’d wager Jackson is influenced by any or all of them, there is more the delicate reflectiveness of Kelly Reichardt than the unmoving atmosphere of Hou Hsiao-hsien, more the evoking spiritualism of Terence Malick than the abiding intensity of Andrei Tarkovsky, more the sustained subtlety of Chantel Ackerman than the laborious patience of Apichatpong Weeresathakul. Yet in its gratitude to all of these precedents, it is innately singular. Jackson’s truest sources are enigmatic but easy to presume. Her veneration for them is the greatest of several qualities that makes her movie one of the first true successors to Daughters of the Dust.
There isn’t much spoken in this movie, but what is said really matters. You get the sense of every line’s intent meaning, crystallizing the core of what Jackson is expressing. Likewise she uses music sparingly, almost exclusively a sombre yet profound motif by Sasha Gordon and Victor Magro recurring a few times as perhaps a symbol of momentous revelation. It’s last appearance is one of the great musical moments of the year, ahead of an affirmation of the inspired cycle and the significance of dirt.
Every life path comes with some bitterness. Maybe that’s what is meant by “all dirt roads taste of salt.” Some experiences and choices in life are hard to take, leave scars, yet ultimately they influence our perception of the world and our place within it in holistically pure ways. Altogether and after a time, it may be found salt doesn’t taste so bad.
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