Raven Jackson
7 connections found
Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
For those who know Tarkovsky’s Mirror, it’s an easy point of reference, just without, you know, all the overtly magical imagery. As in that, Jackson’s subjects seem to spring from the earth itself, their lives, troubles, and dreams expressed through their bodies and their environment.
Elegant camerawork by cinematographer Jomo Fray also marvelously captures this unique flow of time, especially during a showstopping wedding sequence in a church that recalls, of all things, the movement and pacing of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Any film warranting a comparison of that degree is doing something correct.
American Graffiti (1973)
Directed by George Lucas
influenced All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023)
Music
Jackson also works with Miguel Calvo as supervising sound editor and his whole sound team to craft a rich world of sonic montages, with dense layers of nature and water effects mixed with softer tones of human life, all reminding one of the brilliance of George Lucas and Walter Murch's collaborations in THX-1138 and American Graffiti.
The Tree of Life (2011)
Directed by Terrence Malick
influenced All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023)
Visuals
Instead, her style — recalling Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” and seen earlier in her own short “Nettles” — leans upon non-linear storytelling built upon an emotional arc that espouses the complex specificity of this character and her world.
Daughters of the Dust (1991)
Directed by Julie Dash
influenced All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023)
Visuals Themes
Jackson has cited Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust as an influence, and, as in that groundbreaking 1991 film, each scene is so deliberately composed that it conveys a wealth of information and emotion.
With Julie Dash’s seminal Daughters of the Dust cited as an influence, Jackson depicts the outdoors of rural Mississippi in a natural and almost spellbinding way. The first scene depicts Mack fishing with her father, and we see her feel the scales of a catfish she places back in the river. We also hear the slow clicking of the fishing rod as her father teaches her. “Not too quick,” Isaiah says. That instruction is the perfect summarisation of this film’s style.
It’s a good thing Barry Jenkins produced this movie, otherwise he’d have an open-and-shut case of creative larceny against Jackson, who ransacks Moonlight’s playbook in search of the secret to its beatific grace.
The second thing to know is that you might find it difficult to find your bearings whilst watching the film. This story chronicling three eras of a Black protagonist sounds similar to Moonlight – Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski are producers under their Pastel banner – yet it darts around a lot. And scenes only have a few lines of dialogue in the name of uber-naturalism.
While comparable to the more abstractly poetic moments in Moonlight (it’s certainly easy to see what attracted Jenkins to the project), the closest cinematic comparison for Jackson’s work would be Terrence Malick. Similar to Malick’s style, the film is as much about the natural landscape surrounding these characters as it is about the people themselves, often lingering on tangible details such as the rippling of water or hands in various states of motion and connection.
Boyhood (2014)
Directed by Richard Linklater
influenced All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023)
Plot Visuals
I’m all for following a character over many years or decades—Richard Linklater has captured these things beautifully in films like Boyhood and the Before trilogy.
In this approach, the film has a certain kinship with Richard Linklater’s Boyhood: stillness, fleeting connections, sudden overwhelming impressions, the moments after the drama rather than the drama itself are the elements that are foregrounded in place of the more conventional plot points. Unlike Boyhood, however, this is not a film that adheres strictly to a linear timeline. Mack’s life is shattered into fragments and, rather than reassembled into its original shape, it’s pieced together like a memory mosaic.
Aftersun (2022)
Directed by Charlotte Wells
influenced All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023)
Themes Visuals
In a movie like Aftersun, the protagonist’s vague memories and the opacity of Paul Mescal’s tragic character feel crucial to the film, as young Sophie tries to piece together who her father was. All Dirt Roads, however, never attempts to explore who Mack becomes as a woman and how her recollections have affected her. Without any interest in her interior life, it’s unclear why we should care that these events happened to her in the first place.
Not unlike last year’s “Aftersun,” Jackson handles memory with the lucidity of emotion and sensation as the only truth that one can extract from recollection. The snippets of life that shape how we move through the world speak to us in whispers of consciousness, sometimes many years after the fact. They become inextricable from us, and we must try to interpret them not logically but instinctively.
If “Dirt Roads” bears any recent comparison in its audaciously non-linear excavation of remembered joy and sorrow, especially as experienced with a beloved parent, it's to Charlotte Wells' “Aftersun,” also produced by Barry Jenkins and distributed by A24.
Produced by fellow filmmaker Barry Jenkins and getting a release through A24 just like last year’s incredible Aftersun, which would make for a great double feature with this, Jackson's vision is one that feels so alive in how it leaves you unable to look away for fear of missing any individual moment.
All Dirt Roads was produced by Barry Jenkins’ PASTEL, who is coming off another deeply moving portrait of fractured memory and time with Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun; it’s commendable just how much freedom both first-time directors are given.
Films like this, whether they be the works of Malick, Jenkins or even last year's Aftersun, suggest that the type of impressionistic filmmaking often associated with experimentalism can also cross over into more traditional methods of storytelling.