Silence and Soil as Sensory Archives in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

To commemorate IU Cinema’s spring 2025 series AfroFutures: Black Women and Cinematic Storytelling — which included film screenings, a filmmaker visit, Q&As, and more — a scholarly publication was created by the Cinema and bolstered by two commissioned essays from IU students on the films, themes, forms, and other ideas raised by AfroFutures. Republished here, the first of these essays comes from Ahmed Tahsin Shams on filmmaker Raven Jackson’s stunning feature debut.

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This essay explores Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023) as a haptic archive that reconfigures cinematic memory through elemental aesthetics and Black ecological memory work. Combining formal analysis of elliptical montage, mise-en-scène, and sound design with insights from an original interview with the filmmaker, the essay examines how Jackson constructs a non-linear, sensory mode of storytelling centered on Black Southern girlhood, grief, and kinship. The film’s refusal of exposition and embrace of silence, breath, and touch are read as forms of Black ecological memory work — a counter-archival, speculative practice grounded in material ecologies. Drawing on Tina Campt’s idea of a grammar of the archive and Kodwo Eshun’s formulation of counter-memory, the counter-archive resists chronology and coherence in favor of atmospheric immersion, sensory resonance, and haptic presence. It is not about preserving memory in fixed form but about reactivating it through elemental, bodily, and ecological registers. The paper shows how Jackson’s film retools mud, water, and rain as mediums of intergenerational knowledge. By situating the environment as co-narrator, the essay argues that this film performs an embodied Black feminist reworlding: a cinema that listens rather than explains, touches rather than tells, and archives Black life through elemental communion.

Touch, Texture, and the Archive of Gesture

Tina Campt’s notion of “listening to images” offers a fitting heuristic for engaging Raven Jackson’s cinema, where attention to vibration, breath, and atmospheric texture replaces conventional modes of visual mastery (2017, 6–7). In All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, the sound of rain, river flow, and insects’ chorus becomes “felt sound” — a frequency of memory and loss that moves through skin more than ear, inviting a haptic way of knowing (ibid.). Before the story begins, the screen is black. Water gurgles. Frogs croak. Birds chirp. A hand, in extreme close-up, caresses a fish just caught on a hook. The fish is still alive, gasping. Insects trill in the heightened ambient soundscape. A jump cut shifts us to a low-angle, handheld mid-shot: the hand lingers in the lower corner of the frame, just off the rule of thirds. The rest of the composition is river — shimmering, unsettled. The camera sways with the water, its movement loose, liquid. We hear the splash before we see it — the fish, perhaps, being released. The lens drifts to the ripples.

This is the first minute and a half of the film, where time slips from linearity into touch — into the soft friction of clay between fingers, the glisten of fish scales against skin, the weight of thunder in a sky swollen with memory (Fear 2023) as Mack — played across different ages by Mylee Shannon (toddler Mack), Kaylee Nicole Johnson (young Mackenzie), Charleen McClure (adult Mackenzie), and Zainab Jah (old Mackenzie) — moves through childhood, grief, motherhood, love, and loss in rural Mississippi (Carter 2023). From its first frame, Jackson’s debut feature — produced by Barry Jenkins, shot on saturated 35mm by Jomo Fray, and edited by Lee Chatametikool with painterly precision — asks not to be watched but felt, smelled, and remembered. This film unfolds like a living archive — an aesthetic and ontological gesture that places memory not in linear progression but in cyclical return, not in dialogue but in touch, texture, and elemental presence.

Jackson’s elliptical montage and durational close-ups summon what Campt calls a “grammar of the archive” — a tactile and affective register in which “multiple forms of contact: visual contact (seeing), physical contact (touching), psychic contact (feeling), and… sonic contact” replace verbal exposition as the site of meaning (Campt 2017, 72). Mud on palms, the wet press of rainfall, and the lingering warmth of hands are not just images, but haptic frequencies that register memory through sensation rather than narration. In the next scene, Jackson uses this idiosyncratic poetic elliptical montage with a jump cut to connect the earlier fish-being-released scene to Mack’s father training her: “Slow. Take your time.” These are the words young Mack hears from her father, Isaiah (Chris Chalk), as he teaches her to fish. The words could also describe the film’s unhurried rhythm, an invitation to the audience as well.

Miguel “Maiki” Calvo’s soundscape, coupled with the melancholic score by Sasha Gordon and Victor Magro, renders silence as density rather than absence — a sonic memory that lingers on the skin (Horton 2023). The film redefines the cinematic portrayal of Black women’s lives not through speech or spectacle, but through elemental touch, through breath and soil, through rain and silence. In so doing, it asks us to listen differently—to enter the film not as spectators, but as witnesses to a world where dirt remembers, where water grieves, and where Black women’s stories unfold in the time of the earth.

From 5:09 to 5:49, the camera holds a close-up shot of Mack’s fingers caressing the riverbed, approximately thirty-five seconds of pure touch. Thunderclouds appear reflected in water (6:30), a mirror of temporal and atmospheric change. This rhythmic and tonal montage dissolves linearity. Jackson’s elemental poetics converge in a powerful visual and sensory parallel between two scenes: one in which Evelyn (Sheila Atim), Mack’s mother, gathers clay dirt with her daughter in the very beginning of the film, and the closing image of Mack eating that same earth in her school uniform (1:31:00). Evelyn, though minimally present, is central to the film’s articulation of maternal lineage and elemental pedagogy — a transmitter of embodied knowledge through gesture and very little dialogue. Both scenes are composed of wide-angle establishing shots and then low-angle mid-shots and suffused with warm, amber tones that signal not narrative resolution but affective return. These mirrored compositions bookend the film’s elliptical structure, emphasizing continuity through gesture rather than chronology. The gesture of eating dirt — intimate, unspoken, and tactile — materializes what Jackson calls “the closest to Earth” (Jackson 2025). In the interview, she reflected on her grandmother’s stories of clay dirt-eating as a sensory pull toward earth after rain: “It just smells so good… not just any dirt” (ibid.).

This ancestral sensibility is dramatized earlier in a scene of quiet transmission between two generations of Black women. Grandma Betty (Jannie Hampton), framed in a reverent low-angle shot that withholds faces in favor of touch, places soil in Mack’s palm and softly utters, “This you” (43:00). The composition — three hands forming a lotus-like shape — belongs to Betty, young Mack, and Mack’s younger sister Josie (Jayah Henry), whose presence recurs throughout the film as a witness and participant in these sensory rituals. Betty continues: “When it rains, it’s like it’s singing to you. You can smell it in the air. Taste the rain and the dirt.” Mack responds, “Like Earth?” “Yeah, baby. Like Earth,” Betty concludes (Figure 1). This moment, like the later act of eating dirt in the last scene of the film, performs sensorial, non-linear archives that speak not through exposition but through haptic inheritance. Clay becomes a sensory portal, a memory technology, and a mode of Black ecological self-recognition passed from hand to mouth, from ancestor to child.

Jackson’s visual language resists narrative fixity by privileging affective continuity over linear exposition. Characters are rarely named, temporal markers are fluid, and scenes often conclude without closure. This refusal to adhere to dominant cinematic grammar echoes what Campt (2017, 8–10) describes as a counter-visual methodology — one that rejects legibility within dominant regimes of time, space, and recognition. Jackson instead constructs a haptic archive, where meaning emerges not through plot progression but through embodied repetition and atmospheric continuity. In the beginning, Evelyn echoes Isaiah’s earlier instruction: to be slow, to learn to skin fish carefully. These sequences establish Jackson’s mise-en-scène as tactile memory work.

Kodwo Eshun frames memory work as a counter-archival practice that reclaims historical agency by situating Black experience — and the collective trauma of slavery — as foundational to modernity (Eshun 2003, 288). While his formulation is grounded in Afrofuturism’s engagement with sonic technologies and speculative aesthetics, the concept also offers a powerful foundation for rethinking how memory might operate beyond sci-fi or technologically mediated futures. Building on this, I propose Black ecological memory work as a framework that retools archival technologies — sonic, visual, and ritual — as instruments of speculative time grounded in material ecologies. Rather than centering science fiction or imaginary worlds, this framework locates futurity in the tactile and elemental: in mud, water, breath, and rain. In All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, this work takes the form of a haptic temporal poetics, where memory is not narrated but reactivated.

The film’s radical quietude and refusal of conventional exposition align with Eshun’s call for Afrofuturism as “a proleptic intervention” (Eshun 2003, 293) — a prefigurative act that rewrites time from the position of those dislocated by it. Jackson’s film thus engages a Black ecological memory-work poetics of elemental inheritance, in which earth, rain, and breath serve as sensory archives — conduits through which intergenerational knowledge, grief, and hope circulate. Rather than deploying speculative fabulation in the realm of futuristic technology, Jackson’s film offers what Allyson Field calls speculative historiographical practice — “a wager that things might be otherwise” — grounded not in fantasy, but in rain, soil, and the unfinished work of remembering (2022, 6). Mud, water, fish skin, tree dirt — all operate as haptic mediums. The nonhuman world does not frame the human — it interpenetrates, teaches, and responds. Stacy Alaimo (2010) terms this dissolution of boundaries between bodies and environments as “trans-corporeality,” highlighting the body’s permeability and continuous formation through ecological entanglements (15–16, 98). Jackson’s cinematic language registers this permeability.

This haptic grammar is visible in how Jackson uses costume and hair as affective cues of temporality. In one composite mid-shot from behind, Mack’s braid — centered in the frame — functions as a visual anchor that marks her age and emotional stage (12:25), as she walks beside Wood (Reginald Helms Jr.), a recurring yet quietly rendered figure of adolescent love and intimate connection (Figure 2). In another moment, her stark black-and-white clothing (24:27) evokes mourning and signals the death of her mother, Evelyn, without explanatory dialogue. These visual markers operate less as signs to be decoded and more as sensory impressions, an aesthetic aligned with Campt’s insistence on “feeling” through frequencies of touch and breath (Campt 2017, 72).

Seemingly minor gestures, like Mack’s upward gaze in the car toward shifting treetops when her mother passed away or the sisters’ act of pressing lips to their palms, foreground the body as a site of knowledge. In Jackson’s cinematic world, touch is not merely symbolic; it is pedagogical. Mack’s birth scene (44:49), filmed in close-up, centers again on hands, the first touch between mother and child. The image of Evelyn holding toddler Mack — white dress, diaper, dark skin, encircled by trees in their yard — remains still, almost iconographic (57:20). The color theme is intentionally dark green, like the atmosphere of a forest, signaling a return to the womb of nature, aligning with the film’s elemental poetics, evoking fertility, rootedness, and memory-as-ecology. Nature is not background here but cradle. The camera lingers on Mack’s small hand, slowly falling asleep. This is how Jackson frames memory — not as plot but as pulse.

The church wedding sequence (1:02:42) marks a ceremonial crescendo in Jackson’s haptic archive — a moment where song, testimony, and breath converge in what Ashon T. Crawley terms a “choreosonic” atmosphere, a soundscape where voice, gesture, and spirit move together in centrifugal force (2017, 160–162). The diegetic gospel chorus, captured through extreme close-ups of local churchgoers looking directly at the camera, breaks the fourth wall and transforms the cinematic frame into a sacred commons. When the chorus erupts — “Oh Lord, oh Lord, keep your loving arms around me…” — it is a “joyful noise, full of glory,” a punctuatory irruption of spirit through sound (ibid., 161). The hymn becomes both mood and movement, not simply a song but a transition made audible, a lived theology voiced through breath and rhythm.

“It was honoring,” Jackson explains (2025). “That church holds real family histories. The people in that scene were not professional actors, carrying those memories. I did not want to fictionalize them — I wanted to listen to them” (ibid.). Listening, then, becomes both a method and an ethic. In this sequence, Jackson’s practice is more than representational; it is ceremonial. Like Toni Morrison’s notion of rememory in Beloved — not the return of the past as data but its reactivation through ritual (1987) — Jackson re-embodies U.S. Black Southern memory through affective saturation, shared space, and sacred sound.

By Black Southern memory, I refer to a living archive of intergenerational knowledge rooted in the everyday rituals, spiritual practices, and ecological attachments of U.S. Southern Black communities. It is a memory animated less by historical fact than by feeling, gesture, breath, and song. As Saidiya Hartman writes, the archive often functions not as a site of recovery but as “a tomb” — a place that permits only a final glimpse of the disappeared, structured by the “founding violence” of racial slavery (Hartman 2008, 2, 10). This logic continues to shape Black Southern memory, particularly in rural communities where oral tradition, sacred ritual, and embodied gestures persist as modes of historical transmission in the absence — or erasure — of formal documentation. Raven Jackson’s film responds to this condition not with narrative exposition but with sensory reactivation — what Hartman might call a “way of living in the world in the aftermath of catastrophe” (Hartman 2008, 3). By foregrounding breath, soil, and gesture, the film stages an intimate rememory that counters the archival silences imposed by systems of racial and epistemic erasure. These moments collapse boundaries between ritual and realism, actor and non-actor, fiction and documentary. In this scene, breath, voice, and gaze converge to enact a “public zone” (Crawley 2017, 63, 69), a fugitive commons of “shared air” and sonic exchange (ibid., 74), while Jackson’s haptic realism transforms spectatorship into participation.

“A film,” Trinh T. Minh-ha writes, is a site that sets into play a number of “subjectivities — those of the filmmaker, the filmed subjects, and the viewers” (Minh-ha 1991, 148). Raven Jackson’s film exemplifies this sensorial triangulation. Through long takes, elliptical editing, and an unhurried rhythm steeped in elemental tactility, the film refuses narrative exposition in favor of embodied presence. Jackson’s haptic realism — where skin brushes against skin, where mud cakes fingers, where breath is visible on rain-soaked air — has moments that express memory and futurity without the need for words. Campt describes this grammar as “a performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must,” which involves actively “living the future now — as imperative rather than subjunctive — as a striving for the future you want to see, right now, in the present” (Campt 2017, 17).

Memory as Method, Water as Witness

Jackson’s haptic realism and elliptical montage enact what Field describes as a feminist refiguring of historical method, whereby the speculative does not restore lost histories but interrogates the structural conditions that render them ungrievable or illegible (Field 2022, 2). “I wanted the audience to surf through Mack’s life, all stages on the same plane,” Jackson adds, “Water encapsulates everything” (Jackson 2025). This cinematic ethic of elemental memory guides Jackson’s aesthetic and philosophical choices. Rather than a backstory, she gives us a world in which memory lives not behind but within. “Everything is happening now,” she says. For Jackson, the past and future shimmer in the present like sunlight on river water (49:00).

The land becomes a tactile confidante, and water a co-narrator. The scene of Mack’s pregnancy (40:00) returns us to the bathtub. The handheld camera movement gives an effect of floating. Earlier, Mack urinates in the woods, a close-up of urine trickling through dirt (42:40) — rarely has cinema aestheticized bodily fluids with such elemental reverence. Water flows from the body into the earth, making visible the porousness of identity and terrain. Jackson enacts what bell hooks names a “decolonized standpoint,” one rooted not in white recognition but in intracommunal care and affective knowing (hooks 2015, 17). Jackson’s camera does not gaze — it dwells. It lingers on the folds of Black life with reverence, constructing “both a social (physical) and an imaginative (psychic, subjective) space” (Stewart 2005, 13). Here Blackness is not spectacle, but weathered presence — a presence textured by time, touch, and elemental relation. It suggests a durable, resilient, and historically marked presence — Black life that has endured and registered the impact of systemic oppression, time, and the elements, yet persists in quiet, embodied form. This “weathered presence” connects to what Christina Sharpe calls “the weather” (2016, 104–106), a way of describing the constant, background pressure of racism that shapes Black life every day. Sharpe argues that Black people live “in the wake” of slavery, in a world where that history still lingers in violence, loss, and struggle (ibid., 131–32). But even within this harsh atmosphere, Black communities find ways to care for each other, to survive, and to create beauty. She calls this small but powerful act of caring “an ordinary note of care” (ibid., 132).

Jackson creates space — through quiet moments, through images of touch and nature — for Black life to simply exist with depth and dignity. This is not the invention of a new mode of being, but a reclamation: a deliberate reassertion of care, softness, and stillness from visual regimes that have historically either spectacularized Blackness through hypervisibility or denied it interiority and quietude. In Jackson’s elemental framing, we encounter haptic visuality, a kind of seeing that approximates touching, where vision operates like an “organ of touch” (Marks 2002, 105). This mode of sensory engagement extends beyond visual texture to encompass sonic and affective resonance. It aligns with the way Laura Marks theorized a tactile look — a look that “permits identification with…loss, in the decay and partialness of the image” (ibid.). This is a form of loving identification with a disappearing or wounded self — a “reverse mirror stage” in which the viewer identifies not with wholeness, but with fragmentation and memory (ibid., 106). Jackson reclaims this space — not by filling it with didactic narrative, but by creating room for quiet, for grief, for love, and for soil.

Jennifer M. Barker argues that we do not just see emotions; we feel them bodily in tandem with cinematic gestures, as she terms this “muscular empathy” (Barker 2009, 73–76) and double embodiment — being “here” and “there” at once (ibid., 72). At 1:16:57, Old Mack sits quietly at the familiar riverbed, her solitude framed by an extreme wide-angle shot capturing dawn’s gentle emergence and the ambient whispers of nature. The composition, duration, and tactility immerse the audience in that silence. Old Mack’s fingers lightly touch the water’s surface before she silently departs, a gesture heavy with unspoken narrative and tactile remembrance. The nearly four-minute sequence unfolds with minimal speech yet speaks profoundly through touch and elemental communion.

Mack bathes her newborn daughter Lily (1:24:10), assisted by her sister Josie. Their hands gently cradle the infant in a kitchen sink, enacting a tactile ritual of care that transmits knowledge, relationships, and memory across generations. Water, as both cleansing agent and connective medium, anchors this scene in a lineage of embodied intimacy. The sequence concludes in silhouette lighting — darkness indoors contrasting with the brightness outside — and toddler Lily’s crying harmonizes with the rising pitch of the heavy rain in the following cut.

That rain carries us forward through Jackson’s elliptical montage. In the next scene (1:26:00), Mack and a now-young Lily (Robin Crudrup) sit quietly on a bench beneath a gently falling rain, their distinct hair braids visible from behind in a composite two-shot (Figure 3). The rainfall becomes both witness and participant as they reach out to touch the suspended droplets. “Wanna know a secret?” Mack softly asks. “[Drops] don’t end or begin. Just changes form.” Lily responds, “What changes?” Mack answers gently, “Water. All these drops will be river someday, might be snow. Might be in you.” The sequence closes with close-ups of their hands reaching upward, embracing the falling rain as beloved kin — affirming water as memory, transformation, and inheritance.

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References

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Barker, Jennifer M. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Carter, Katie. “SLIFF Review: ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.’” Katie at the Movies, November 13, 2023. https://katieatthemovies.com/2023/11/13/sliff-review-all-dirt-roads-taste-of-salt/.

Crawley, Ashon T. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.

Eshun, Kodwo. “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 287–302. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949397.

Fear, David. “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt Isn’t Just a Movie — It’s an Immersive Experience.”

Rolling Stone, November 3, 2023. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/all-dirt-roads-taste-of-salt-review-raven-jackson-barry-jenkins-best-movies-of-2023-1234865640/.

Field, Allyson Nadia. “Editor’s Introduction: Acts of Speculation.” Feminist Media Histories 8, no. 3 (2022): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.1.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1–14. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Horton, Adrian. “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt Review – Experimental Film Pulls on the Senses.”

The Guardian, January 27, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jan/27/all-dirt-roads-taste-of-salt-movie-review-sundance-film-festival-raven-jackson.

Jackson, Raven, dir. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. USA: A24, 2023.

Jackson, Raven. Interview by Ahmed Tahsin Shams. YouTube video, 49:16. Posted April 10, 2025. https://youtu.be/ZlnaSl9ZAtM.

Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

Oppermann, Serpil. “Theorizing Ecocriticism: Toward a Postmodern Ecocritical Practice.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 13, no. 2 (2006): 103–28. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44070262.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1991.

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Ahmed Tahsin Shams is a Ph.D. student (2023-2028) in Media Arts and Sciences at the Media School of Indiana University Bloomington, USA. His areas of research interest include eco-cinema aesthetics, experimental cinematic practices, and visual arts in the Age of the Anthropocene.