Walkabout

Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (1971) was the former cinematographer's first solo feature as director, and it set out the hypnotic, fragmentary visual style that would mark his whole career. It competed at Cannes. Roeg took a slender survival story and made of it a sensuous film about nature, civilisation and the gulf between cultures.

Jenny Agutter plays the English schoolgirl stranded in the outback with her young brother (Roeg's son, Luc) after a family catastrophe, and David Gulpilil, in a star-making debut, is the Aboriginal youth on his walkabout, the solitary rite of passage into manhood, who saves them. Roeg shoots the desert with a rapturous, almost abstract eye: close-ups of insects and heat shimmer, elliptical cutting, an Edward Bond script pared to a minimum of dialogue. The film speaks through image and juxtaposition far more than through plot.

Its lyrical strangeness and its melancholy theme of irreconcilable worlds influenced a generation of film-makers drawn to elliptical, image-led storytelling, and Gulpilil became a defining presence in Australian cinema. Under the beauty runs a current of loss and missed understanding, between the children and the boy as much as between their cultures, and it stays with you long after. Walkabout is ravishing, mysterious and sorrowful, one of the most singular films of the early 1970s, and few films since have trusted pictures so completely to carry a story.