Raven Jackson’s debut feature shows the world of rural black Southern life through the eyes of a serious, sensitive girl.
A black girl is being taught how to fish by her father. We see a close up of her hands turning the reel. “Not so fast,” he tells her. “Easy.” When she catches a fish she touches its scales with her fingers, feeling its curious texture. We see her face, with intense eyes, serious and still. A younger girl, her sister, is looking on. Eventually the father says “let’s go home,” but the girl pauses to touch the shallow water and hold some mud in her hand. This film is founded on the sense of touch more than sight or sound. It’s the unique and persistent method of the debut feature film by 35-year-old writer/director Raven Jackson, with a cryptic title, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.
Almost every shot in the movie is a close-up, a deliberate concentration on the smaller aspects of life, which Jackson places, contrary to what we’re used to, at the front of awareness. Most of all, hands: the hands that touch things, and hold other hands, hands reaching out as a means of awareness and a way to express love. The hands of the girl we first saw touching the fish belong to Mackenzie, nicknamed Mac. As fragmentary scenes continue, we learn that her younger sister’s name is Josie. We meet her mother, Evelyn—wiry, strong, and protective. From the wooded scenery, the creeks, the frequent rains, and the accents, we sense that this is somewhere in the South.
An aspect of Jackson’s style we’re aware of right away is that we’re not given explanations. The film is shot not as a linear story but as if everything is being experienced for the first time through a raw innocent consciousness. A brief sequence showing the kids riding bikes by some shops is the one indicator that there is a town nearby. A scene where Mac’s parents are dancing to some soul records tells us we’re in the early 1970s. The movie can seem like a puzzle where we gather little pieces from here and there, and where we sense the outlines of events we’re not shown—a relative’s death, the birth of a child, a love affair that didn’t work out. We go back and forth in time, with Mac as a young woman, then a girl again, and even a baby. The point, however, is not the passage of time, but the awareness of the moment.
“Slow cinema” is a label for a certain kind of approach to film that contains many different kinds of meaning depending on the filmmaker. The one common element is the turning of one’s attention to the present. We’ve become accustomed to visual language as a succession of scenes and shots, with the editing becoming increasingly faster in the modern era. What happens next? And then, what happens after that? But artists still look for different forms, and some choose to linger on the present as a way of bringing the mind to stillness, to awareness of a being which is beyond mere thinking.
Raven Jackson has chosen a radical form of this approach. It requires our patience, and favors the symbolism of hands and of people embracing, along with close-ups of nature, at one point even taking the time to watch an earthworm.
Finally, the odd sounding title, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, bears a meaning of legacy and grief. We are made of earth and water, Mac’s grandmother says, and we see this rural black family digging the clay dirt from around the exposed tree roots on a bank, and eating little bits of this clay. The earth is our love, our essence. The salt is the suffering and loss we experience in our lives. Jackson is a poet, and her film is a quiet and profound visual poem.
