ALL DIRT ROADS TASTE OF SALT (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
There’s a beautiful piece of writing by American film theorist Vivian Sobchack called What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision of the Flesh. Here, Sobchack gives an extraordinarily powerful description of her experience of watching the opening few moments of Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), where she notes that while her eyes struggled to make sense of the images before her – of what she would soon learn was the first person perspective of the film’s main character looking through her fingers held before her eyes with the sunlight streaming in between them – her body (and her fingers specifically) recognized immediately what was happening. Celebrating a kind of haptic, multisensory experience of film beyond the oft-privileged dominance of sound and vision, Sobchack wrote “my fingers knew what I was looking at…my fingers comprehended that image [and] grasped it with a nearly imperceptible tingle of attention and anticipation”.
The brainchild of writer/director Raven Jackson, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is very much a drama of touch. Long, lingering, effortless shots of hands and fingers dominate the film; much more than verbal language, this is a film whose drama emphatically and fundamentally plays out through the dynamics of touch – both touching, and being touched. But, recalling Sobchack’s experience in a deeply profound way, at play here is not merely a case of who or what is being touched, but rather how the film provokes an immediate feeling of sensory recognition equally as tactile and as haptic. This is, quite literally, a film that we feel in a very real way; not just in terms of an emotional response, but how that emotional response is bound so closely to these feelings of a broader sensory recognition.
Mud, water, hair, fabric and, most of all, the skin of others – Jackson lingers with breathtaking confidence on these moments and celebrates them through close up after close up. In its telling of the joys and pains of a young Black girl in Mississippi in the 1960s, following her as she grows older and becomes a woman, this is a film simultaneously both acutely specific to the lived experience of its protagonist and the socio-political context within which she lives, while also speaking with a grander poetic vision of what it means to truly be alive in a human body. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is a film that holds the notion of intimacy in a way that almost feels sacred, each scene calmly demanding a kind of reverence and respect for not merely the stories of those the film so lovingly shares, but the power of cinema itself to spark such precious moments of shared experience.
