The Visual Poetry in “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt”

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Director Raven Jackson and cinematographer Jomo Fray use the language and techniques of poetry to create her debut feature All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.

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The mediative experimental drama explores the influential people, places, and events Mack (played by Kaylee Nichole and Zainab Jan as younger and older versions of the character) has encountered while growing up in Mississippi.

Mack’s story spans decades and portrays her life as inextricable from family and place. “Jackson paints a portrait with songs, rain, touch and dirt, so that the film is also the biography of a place, and of how nature and rooms remember what happened there,” Miriam Bale, the artistic director of the Indie Memphis Film Festival, writes for Film Comment.

A mantra for Fray (whose credits include Tayarisha Poe’s 2019 feature Selah and the Spades and Jackson’s 2018 short Nettles), is to shoot the way a director dreams.

“I want to create the images a director would produce if they knew what we knew about cinematography,” he told Trevor Hogg in an interview for British Cinematographer.

The film has no set narrative structure. “It was about the texture of that emotion rather than covering it more traditionally,” Fray said. “It’s about building a scene that has specific coverage knowing that those scenes could be put into a different order but that’s why you find motifs naturally as you’re shooting.”

Fray elaborated on finding the visual language for the film to Bale, saying that they wanted to make cinema more sensorial.

“The conversations we had early on were like, “Can we smell this image? Can I feel this image? In this image, I want to literally feel the salt on my brow from the sweat of being in the sun so long. How do we conjure that? how we can create more sensorial feelings and textures in every moment, every image, every gesture, every detail.”

To push themselves to adhere to this aesthetic they drew up a 12-point visual manifesto inspired by the work of director Terrence Malick, which they read to one another at the start of every single day.

One of the points on the manifesto was “to be present to the cinema on set.”

“Raven would direct the action and we would find the scene, and we would watch it together in rehearsal and start to see the small gestures that are built into the rehearsal that we just find our eyes drawn to,” Fray said when interviewed by Stephen Saito for The Moveable Fest.

Another manifesto point was to speak in “slant rhymes,” which was a phrase they used to remind themselves that it was okay to be inspired by the same thing multiple times in multiple scenes.

“It was our attempt to try to create these motifs in the film, but to create them in a naturalistic way, so we didn’t go in thinking, “We want to shoot a lot of hands,” but we would find ourselves being inspired by what a character’s hands were doing at a certain moment in the scene, and we didn’t try to stop ourselves to have visual diversity with the film.”

The manifesto also required them to be elemental which meant being emotionally open day-to-day, scene-to-scene, moment by moment on set than was necessary.

“We chose tools so that the camera and the lighting can get out of the way a bit. Raven never really wanted a lot on set and didn’t want any artifice when we could avoid it, so my gaffer Jay Warrior and my key grip Forrest Penny Brown created a lot of our lighting from outside in, a lot of the time was using mirrors, to create that feeling.”

Inevitably, this meant the film was shot on 35mm. They did a lot of testing for different ways to process the film as well as with different perforations mixed with different lenses.

“So much of this movie has to do with interiority, so we wanted a tool that could really make us be inside their emotions, and have it be incredibly textural, so that you feel the coarseness of the image between your fingers,” Fray told Bale.

 They selected 500T 5219 Kodak stock, making a push process for the entire movie.

“We only used one stock, even though this movie takes place in different time periods,” Fray explained, “For Raven and me, these are not flashbacks or flash-forwards. Every single moment, every single frame in this movie, is about Mack dealing with the present-tense stakes of her life at that given moment.”

The A24 release has received multiple nominations on the festival circuit and won several, including most recently for Best Cinematography at the Black Reel Awards.

In an interview moderated by cinematographer Mia Cioffi Henry, Fray shared more about his creative process, and the lessons he’s learned throughout his career.

He described the visual style of All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt as less about setting out to make poetic imagery, and more about “trying to create a process where poetry could find us.

“I don’t necessarily want the image to be unlocked in its meaning. I want it to be a metaphor,” he told Cioffi. “So that the viewer is actually grafting their histories, their loves and fears onto the image and the image is welcoming them to engage with it. It is an invitation for the viewer to put their histories on it, and in that way, hopefully make the images more robust and also make the image one where a bunch of different people can all have different interpretations.

“All I really want is for the audience to be active while they’re watching the movie, not passive.”