All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
all hands set to 'hug'
dir: Raven Jackson
2023
Just to assert the stonkingly obvious – films are a visual medium. But what about when a film tries to convey something about the senses other than the visual and the auditory ones?
It’s considered a failure, but one of my favourite books and eventual films ever made was Perfume, a beautifully written book by Patrick Suskind, and, to me, a delightful, awe-inspiring macabre movie made by Tom Tykwer. Its great attempt, and perhaps great failure, is attempting to tell a story so centred around the human animal’s sense of smell.
For me to accept that the film is a failure means I have to accept that the book is a failure, and that I cannot do. Just because they tried to tell a story about smell in a visual form doesn’t mean they didn’t succeed. The writer and the filmmaker went to great lengths to convey what they tried to convey, and for some people they got the visceral, transporting sensation across, and for others, they didn’t.
Why in fuck’s name are you yet again talking about a different film, I hear you groan. Well, my point is, this film here All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt tries to tell, in a visual and auditory medium, being film, a story that is mostly conveyed through the sense of touch. In other words, using visuals and sound design to try to convey how something feels, both in an emotional and tactile sense. A grandmother’s hands; a sister’s shoulder; a beloved’s shoulder, a dying fish’s scales, a baby’s head, the feel of dirt in your hand; a hand swirling in water, a mother’s reproach…
That’s not easy. Movies show us what to feel. They often tell us what to feel. We often have characters or voiceovers tells us exactly how characters feel. But we rarely have actors trying to convey something about the tactile sense of how something physically felt at the time. And we almost never have entire films which are about how existence felt for a person at different times in their lives through who they touched and how.
There is no plot in this film, and the chronology jumps around continuously. There’s very little dialogue throughout, and much of the cinematography involves filming people in close up, their faces, especially their hands, their heads, their backs, and how they interact with people or with the world.
